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 spell out his critical presuppositions in advance and avoid, when exasperated, interpreting his utterances in a frame that is pseudoclassical (literature is the presentation of sound ideas in an attractive emotional context) or pseudoromantic (poetry is the overflow of emotion in a noninhibiting intellectual context). In addition, since literary criticism is probably like theology in that the basic statements are figurative, we have to avoid taking Eliot literally. His criticism is not about literary "things," for a poem is not a thing the way a carrot is a carrot; criticism is about acts fundamentally mysterious since they are not acts in the ordinary sense…. Still further, in considering what Eliot says we have frequently to suspend judgment on the rightness or wrongness of his individual judgments, or their specific importance or unimportance, in order to concentrate on the concept of the literary act that his ideas are pointing at. His practical criticism is, perhaps, theoretical criticism, an instrument, mainly, for elucidating literary principles. Finally, we have to know something of the epistemological system, the terms of which control the terms of Eliot's literary criticism; we have, in short, to be sensitive to the philosophical nuances of words like "object," "feeling," "ideas," "point of view" as Eliot uses them. (pp. 51-2)
If Eliot's beginning as a poet is a metaphysical standpoint, it is tempting to see his early, and most influential criticism as the application of a philosophy to literature. Because it is fragmentary although voluminous, it is exasperating; and yet because it is the response of a young poet schooled in philosophy to a problem at once personal and cultural, it is significant and emotionally charged to a degree unusual in criticism. To ask what this criticism means is to ask two questions. What did the poet write it for? and what "idea" explains and reconciles puzzling and seemingly discrepant utterances?
