Abuse of Criticism: T.S. Eliot and Northrop Frye’s Academic Ramp-up to “Fake News”

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” originates T.S. Eliot’s 1932 Harvard Norton Lecture on “taste” maligning “a marked swing in his feelings toward Shelley's verse from fervid imitation to contemptuous disdain.” Lowe, P.J., 2002. Eliot’s acolyte, Northrop Frye, in 1957 follows similar tautology to exclude Shelley’s straw-man agonist, Thomas Love Peacock, from Anatomy of Criticism commentary over Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poesy,” Shelley’s obvious rhetorical target. Here we treat Eliot and Frye’s methodologies as a Prigozhin troll factory authoritarian oligarchic academic coup that, “like the Internet Research Agency, engage in … ‘coordinated inauthentic activity, ranging from the use of false names and the creation of false audiences to the publication of false stories and the creation of divisive narratives.”