How can a book of criticism be at once so distinguished and so unimportant? The question is the more worth asking because the author of [On Poets and Poetry] was at one time so unquestionably a major critical influence. (p. 177)
The Sacred Wood, I think, had very little influence or attention before the Hogarth Press brought out Homage to John Dryden, the pamphlet in which the title essay was accompanied by 'The Metaphysical Poets' and 'Andrew Marvell'. It was with the publication in this form of those essays … that Eliot became the important contemporary critic. It was the impact of this slender new collection that sent one back to The Sacred Wood and confirmed with decisive practical effect one's sense of the stimulus to be got from that rare thing, a fine intelligence in literary criticism—the fine intelligence so certainly present in the earlier and larger collection. And the nature of the peculiar force of the criticism—the condition of the authority with which it claimed one's attention—was now plain…. Eliot was the man of genius who, after the long post-Swinburnian arrest, altered expression. Such an achievement was possible only to a poet in whom the creative gift was a rare gift of consciousness. An intense and highly conscious work of critical intelligence necessarily preceded and accompanied the discovery of the new uses of words, the means of expressing or creating the new feelings and modes of thought, the new rhythms, the new versification. This is the critical intelligence manifested in those early essays; Eliot's best, his important, criticism has an immediate relation to his technical problems as the poet who, at that moment in history, was faced with 'altering expression'.
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