The question sounds eminently reasonable, but remains unanswerable: what is revolutionary in the criticism of T. S. Eliot? Everyone—except apparently Eliot himself—can see that the critical tradition of the whole English-speaking world was turned upside down by the trickle of articles and lectures—there has never, strictly, been a critical book—issuing from his pen since the First World War. But the nature of his influence as a critic has always been felt to be mysterious and indefinable…. Disciples—even enemies—have hardly succeeded in identifying what is new and special in Eliot's criticism, though they have been loud both in praise and censure. The most discreet of major English critics, he has practised evasion and reticence with determined skill. In his earliest period, positions were tentatively stated and argument disarmed by a certain irony; in his middle years, argument was openly spurned; and in the later years, since the Second World War, he elaborately pretended never to have been a major critic at all. Altogether, his critical career might have been planned as a vast hoax to tempt the historian into solemnities for the sport of Philistines.
The key to Eliot's reticence as a critic surely lies in the relationship between his criticism and his poetry. In a sense, his criticism is a smoke-screen to the rest of his career. It misleads as much as it reveals about the quality of his poems, and the smoke-screen grows thicker as the years pass. By the 1950s Eliot's determination to hide himself from the devotees of his poetry by means of critical red-herrings had grown so obvious as to suggest a possible motive: the intense love of privacy, perhaps, of a fastidious New Englander whose poetry has led him into the indignity of spiritual self-exposure. (pp. 168-69)
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