I beg to differ …

… Eliot the Adversary by Mark Anthony Signorelli. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… contemporary Christians and conservatives alike … generally take Eliot to be “one of theirs,” a great champion of tradition and ordered society, a judgment no doubt based on Eliot's own description of himself as a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."

But the Eliot who so described himself was not the young modernist Eliot. Note the concluding lines of "Preludes," one of his early poems:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.


There you have the dialectic that would torment Eliot over the next couple of decades — the still, quiet voice of the traditionalist being dismissed brusquely by the young modernist.  The Waste Land is the culmination of the argument, you might say. Soon after is Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.
As Somerset Maugham said, "men are not a of a piece." We change. With luck, we grow. I certainly think Eliot did.

Any attempt to characterize Eliot as a conservative or a defender of tradition must overcome the prima facie objection that his verse constituted a radical repudiation of over two thousand years of Western poetics …

What about the prima facie evidence of the imitation of terza rima in "Little Gidding," as well as its clear allusion to the relation between Virgil and Dante? There's plenty of traditional verse throughout Eliot's work.