To do justice to Eliot's early criticism is hard work because of the number of considerations that have to be kept in mind simultaneously. We have, first, to think of that early criticism in the context of all of Eliot's work, prose and poetry. We have, second, to see it intervening between his doctoral dissertation ["Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley"] (1916) and The Waste Land (1922). We have, third, to read all of it, or just about all of it, for some is not easy to obtain. We receive a different impression from such essays as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "Hamlet," and "The Metaphysical Poets" when we see them in sequence with a hundred or so other articles that Eliot wrote between January, 1916, and November, 1923. Moreover, in speaking about Eliot's work, as in thinking about any literary criticism, we have to...