The linkages between Eliot's criticism and the theories of New Criticism can be seen in three areas: 1) models of what a poetic text is; 2) models of what true literary criticism is and what it should seek to accomplish; and 3) models of the relationship between the aesthetic world of the poetic text and the world at large. With respect to the nature of a poetic text, Eliot in his early essays envisions texts as autotelic, self-sufficient objects whose meanings inhere in their own internal structures and organizations. His focus is always on what happens in a literary work rather than upon either an author's intentions (or other aspects of a text's production) or a reader's response. His impersonal theory of poetry and his stress upon the material objectivity of the text are codified as central tenets of New Criticism by Wimsatt and Beardsley's discussions of the pathetic and intentional fallacies, and Eliot's own attention to textual details serves as a model of New Critical close reading.
In a similar vein Eliot derides the impressionistic criticism of the late nineteenth century and seeks instead an objective criticism whose tools are comparison and analysis. With these tools the critic can probe the literary object in the same way that a scientist probes a natural object, and it is this objective model of criticism that is strongly endorsed by such New Critics as Brooks and Ransom.
