Writing to his brother in 1919, Eliot predicted the disapproving litany that greeted his quatrain poems then, and that has done so since. He considered “Burbank” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” among the best poems he had written. Calling these two poems “intensely serious,” Eliot nonetheless remarked that the ordinary London journalists considered him a wit or satirist, and speculated that Americans would regard him as “merely disgusting.” Both responses, one on each side of the Atlantic, miss the point: London dismisses Eliot as a light-weight, while Boston sniffs that its sensibilities have been bruised. “Merely disgusting” strikes just the studied note of victims trying to disguise satirically inflicted wounds.