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 intellectual survey of the highest order has been carried out as it were off stage, and that what one is getting is not even a full report of the results, but simply the application of a few of the results, devastatingly and accurately, to certain current problems of literary value that have come in Eliot's way. The later essays do not develop this critical approach, and in them the stylistic impact is blurred rather than sharpened; they explain and extend certain features of the approach by moving further in the direction of an explicitly theological and sociological attitude to literature.
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