Indeed, it is Eliot's project, shared by the New Critics, to make literary criticism an autonomous, rigorous field of knowledge distinct from biography, psychology, philosophy, and the other humanistic disciplines. Against the chaotic relativism of impressionistic criticism, Eliot asserts the standards and authority of a literary tradition within which a work must be set in order to be evaluated. Thus the act of criticism, like the work itself, is de-subjectivized and de-historicized, and poetic meaning becomes impersonal, public, and objective.
Such a model of objective criticism is especially well tuned to a particular type of poetry, one which is intellectually complex and filled with paradoxes, tensions, and ironies for the critic to explore and explain. Thus Eliot's rewriting of the Western literary tradition, his devaluing of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Romanticism, and his promoting of the metaphysical poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries moved to the center of the tradition the very texts New Criticism was able to deal with most effectively, thereby validating its theories and methodologies.
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