[Gregory Dowling]

Eliot did revise his opinion on Chesterton in later years, and the two men exchanged some friendly correspondence. Here is the memorial note he wrote on Chesterton's death for Criterion:

It is not for his attainment in pure letters that he should be celebrated here: though it may be said that if he did nothing to develop the sensibility of the language, he did nothing to obstruct it. What matters here is his lonely moral battle against his age, his courage, and his bold combination of genuine conservatism, genuine liberalism, and genuine radicalism.

Eliot said that he always enjoyed Chesterton's fiction.

As for the quotations from Orthodoxy, I think it fair to point out that Chesterton was not specifically attacking scientists. What he wrote, before the passage I quoted about Cowper, was:

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

It is also worth pointing out that Chesterton was unlikely to have thought of Smart and Clare as great poets, since they were both little known during his lifetime. And, of course, the confessionals came much later.

Chesterton is a writer with a great many flaws, and I can easily understand why some might dislike him. However, I find I can put up with those flaws for his clarity, his insights and his wit. Probably the best assessment of him as a writer is to be found in the introduction I referred to above by W. H. Auden. You can find it in his Collected Prose, Volume VI, and also in Forewords and Afterwords.