SOURCE: "'Rhetoric' and Poetic Drama," in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Methuen & Co., 1920, pp. 78-85.

In the following essay, Eliot declares that "in the particular case of Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation, the occasion were perfectly suited and combined. The tirade generated by this combination is not only genuinely and highly dramatic: it is possibly poetry also."

The death of Rostand is the disappearance of the poet whom, more than any other in France, we treated as the exponent of "rhetoric," thinking of rhetoric as something recently out of fashion. And as we find ourselves looking back rather tenderly upon the author of Cyrano we wonder what this vice or quality is that is associated as plainly with Rostand's merits as with his defects. His rhetoric, at least, suited him at times so well, and so much better than it suited a much...