This essay is concerned not with extracting principles but with establishing the tone of Eliot's criticism…. [It] is necessary to go back to the germinal work, the essays collected in The Sacred Wood (1920), to find in a pure form the relation between what is said in his criticism and the authoritative personal tone; in this relation lies the secret of his compulsive success…. [The] rhetorical element is important in these early essays. The quiet tone, precise but hedged with qualification, is the exact embodiment of the thought and a closer examination of it may lead us to look more closely at the thought…. (pp. 26-7)

In The Sacred Wood the ideas and style are already fully formed and the sense of speaking from an assured position is in the young Eliot quite dauntingly middle-aged…. [The] impression left by The Sacred Wood is that a completely honest and rigorous...