There are two principal ways in which Eliot has made an impact on composers. First by the magisterial quality of his work and ideas forming a central document of modernism with implications for all the arts: and secondly by providing challenging and often intimidating poetry which might be set to music. An example of a composer profoundly affected by Eliot is Michael Tippett, whose operas owe much to Eliot's plays and ideas, although he never actually set anything to music. When he asked Eliot if he would write the text for his oratorio, A Child of our Time, Eliot famously deferred, causing Tippett to be responsible for his own libretti from then onwards. At the other extreme the most commercially successful example of a composing partnership with Eliot is, of course, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cats has propelled the domestic side of Eliot into contemporary multimedia folklore in a way that could hardly have been predicted. Lloyd Webber took the subject seriously, drawing on unpublished material, but his interest in these poems was anticipated by Alan Rawsthorne during Eliot's lifetime.

The discussion here is largely concerned with the reaction of two major composers to Eliot. With figures of this stature, even apparently trivial biographical details are worth looking at in sequence to provide links between composer and poet and to see whether these composers treated an eminent figure like Eliot any differently from any other writer whose text they might have been setting to music.

Composers were initially hesitant about appropriating the giants of early and mid-twentieth-century poetry, except where music was envisaged as in some poems by Yeats and Auden. But Eliot, Hopkins and Dylan Thomas were for long felt to be so complete on their own terms that the addition of another layer – music – seemed superfluous. In many ways, it was Stravinsky – the only major composer to set Eliot in his lifetime – who violated this respectful relationship between composer and poet so characteristic of the English Georgians.