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 ...

The object of this study is to investigate T. S. Eliot in regard to that very elusive and omnipresent genre of literary history, the lyric. Eliot is a very good practitioner in lyric poetry and continually comments on the art of the lyric in his critical works. An examination of his finest lyric practice in the light of his theory on the subject will further illuminate the unity of Eliot as poet and critic, and quite possibly shed more light on the Four Quartets, whose core passages are self-contained lyric...

Eliot's experiment with drama in Sweeney Agonistes constituted a false start. Not until 1934 did another such effort come to light, and that was so unfortunate—through no great fault of Eliot's own—that scarcely anyone could have predicted for him a successful future in theatrical writing. The Rock, it is true, is a pageant rather than a play, and largely a prose pageant at that, so that within the terms of his arrangement with the producers he had little opportunity to improve h...

When we think of the character of literary dictators in the past, it is easy to see that since 1922, at least, Eliot has occupied a position in the English-speaking world analogous to that occupied by Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold. It is noticeable that each of these dictators has been a critic as well as a poet, and we may infer from this the fact that it is necessary for them to practice both poetry and criticism. Another characteristic is that each of these liter...

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 ind...

'Gerontion' must be seen as central to Eliot's poetic practice; here he initiates and exhaustively explores permanent features of his basic idiom. Here also he enacts the logic—the social as well as verbal logic—of the conversion of words into the Word. Thereafter, the Word within the word is immanent as doctrinal justification for each poetic act. 'Gerontion' may well end in Eliot, as [Hugh] Kenner claims, one whole phase of Anglo-American linguistic practic...

Eliot's theory of poetry falls neither into didacticism nor into the opposite heresies of imagism and echolalia. The real 'purity' of poetry—to speak in terms at once paradoxical and generic—is to be constantly and richly impure: neither philosophy, nor psychology, nor imagery, nor music alone but a significant compounding of them all. Orthodoxy is always more difficult to state than heresy, which is the development of an isolated 'truth'; but Eliot excels at...

Almost every poem Eliot wrote is dominated by one or more traditional epistemological concerns—knowledge and belief, memory and perception, forgetting, recognition, and precognition. But his poetry is also dominated by prophets and prophecies, magi, choric forebodings, people who know but cannot see or speak, or if they speak are not heeded. His people are surrounded by a world of talking birds, cryptic messages, telling images, and words unheard; and what his people come to know is what they should ...

The most frequently noted feature of Eliot's prose style is that it combines assertion and reticence to a remarkable degree. Particularly in essays from Eliot's great period as a critic (roughly 1918 to 1936), one is apt to encounter the largest statements about literature and sensibility, or apparently final judgment upon this or that figure; but the logic of the argument often remains elusive. The statement is treated as self-sufficient, or becomes part of another, larger issue…. (p. ...

[As] I read Eliot he is the one poet writing in English who is centrally in the symboliste tradition. What Eliot puts into his poems is determined preponderantly by his being an American; how he structures his poems is determined preponderantly by his sitting at the feet of the French, in the first place (as is generally acknowledged, and as he testified himself) at the feet of Jules Laforgue. Four decades of commentary and explication have been largely wasted, because of the refusal of commentators to expl...

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 qualificat...

The strength of T. S. Eliot's poetry depends on insights that mediate between morality and psychology. Eliot understood the shifting, paradoxical nature of our deepest emotions and judgments, and tried to embody this quality in his style. "All that concerned my family," he once said, "was 'right and wrong,' what was 'done and not done.'" It became the poet's discovery that what is wrong when acted may be right when remembered, that today&...

[Eliot] uses his historical studies for the sake of literary understanding, and therefore might be called a historical critic. If the title conferred upon him seems quaint, I mean the formality to stand for the fact that he is learned in the precise learning of the scholars, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. I have not heard of any serious impeachment of his learning coming out of the universities. If the academic scholars do not recognize him as one of themselves, it is because he turns his scholarship to point...

The common observation of the coldly apocalyptic gesture in Eliot, the intoning of favored set phrases ("Unreal City"), the self-concealing reverie that proved a peculiarly satisfying mode, fit nonetheless with [Gabriel Pearson's account of the social situation of Eliot as an embattled aesthete]; but with the proviso that we take this in its spirit, since with slight alterations it could cover any symbolist retreat to language, any style enamored of obscure intensities of speech. Disinh...

[Despite critical opinion to the contrary, the prose and poetry of T. S. Eliot] are very closely related. If one reads through the whole of the prose and the whole of the verse, one finds that the same process, the same search for a Tradition and for orthodox principles, combined with the same sensitivity to contemporary life, is developed through both of them. In the essays there are frequent references (they grow more open as time goes on) to problems in which the writer himself is involved in his creativ...

Now that some thirty years of controversy have passed, it is possible to consider the early critical work of T. S. Eliot in fair perspective and to attempt an assessment both of its values and of its limitations. Though the uncollected essays and the later collected essays have their importance, the major influence stems from the handful of essays published in 1920 as The Sacred Wood and the three critiques collected in 1924 under the title Homage to John Dryden. These two small volumes brought much that wa...

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 publicatio...

As a critic, Eliot occupies to-day a position of distinction and influence equal in importance to his position as a poet. His writings have been comparatively brief and rare—he has published only four small books of criticism—yet he has probably affected literary opinion, during the period since the War, more profoundly than any other critic writing English. Eliot's prose style has a kind of felicity different from that of his poetic style; it is almost primly precise and sober, yet wit...

To begin with Eliot's title, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," is the second half quite what the first led us to expect? A man named J. Alfred Prufrock could hardly be expected to sing a love song; he sounds too well dressed. His name takes something away from the notion of a love song; the form of the title, that is to say, is reductive. How does he begin singing?     Let us go then, you and I,    When the evening i...

[Eliot's pessimism] finds its complement in the historical disillusion of our epoch…. It is because the dilemma of man's true significance is at the heart of the century's trouble that Eliot has gained such a large audience, and that his work has provoked such extreme reactions. Yet there seems to be a paradox here, for his poetry is the poetry of the isolation of a single soul, and very rarely do personal human relationships figure in it. It is a poetry that is almost always rem...

The quality which makes Mr. Eliot almost unique as a critic is the purity of his interest in literature as literature—as art autonomous and complete. Hence the power and penetration of his essays—the fullness of his point of view—the disciplined (and thus limited) fertility of his ideas. Personal taste has its influence but is not paramount. He may or may not suffer from a romantic morality; may adhere to the tory principle in politics, and the catholic regimen in religion—or be ...

Despite Eliot's professed historicism, and his concern with the tradition, the thing which characterizes the rhetoric of his criticism (and his poetry as well) is the absence of presence. To put it another way, history and art can only be an imperfect sign of the divine, an immanence available not to the will but only to an ascetic ecstasy. History and knowledge bear marks of guilt, as in "Gerontian," and only in the silence and innocence of the unspoken Word is the Word known in the wo...

Eliot's views on personality in poetry seem to have two phases … but offer no serious contradiction. The impersonality of the poet creates a set of poems which add up to a distinct and significant personality: the poems have the personality. The first half of this proposition, the purging of "all the accidents of personal emotion" from the poem, is not much cherished these days…. Few critics are now as eager as Eliot was to separate "art" from "the eve...

[However] admirable as finely tempered, self-possessed criticism [Eliot's] Elizabethan essays may appear to scholar-critics, they reveal in effect, in the guise of criticism, some of Eliot's obsessional problems. In retrospect they are seen to be every bit as much the co-lateral documentation of the subjective origins of his early poetry, and of his plays, which are all about guilt, as a model piece of criticism on his own principles of analysis and comparison, cool, rational, marvellously poi...

[The] war book above all others in the 'twenties was The Waste Land, and no account of the forces that formed the 'thirties generation would be accurate that neglected that powerfully influential poem. Eliot had an acute sense of what he called 'the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history', and he put that sense of history into his poem. And in 1922 contemporary history meant vestiges of the war: hence the two veterans who meet in the first part, and...

As a major poet T. S. Eliot began in the Waste Land and ended at Little Gidding. That both places are associated with chapels is no accident: even in the depths of the tradition [of Victorian and twentieth-century English poetry] …, the way out is symbolized for believers and unbelievers alike by religious buildings, real or legendary. Since it is in Eliot's later work that major English poetry emerges from its fixation on lost childhood and its spiritual paralysis, we naturally look for reaso...

[It is] disconcerting for the ardent student of Eliot to find, in [After Strange Gods], no indication of a richer spiritual life as the result of his conversion [to Anglo-Catholicism]…. After Strange Gods, which announces itself as "A Primer of Modern Heresy", far from showing any enrichment of Mr. Eliot's life, indicates on the contrary an increasingly fastidious (perhaps it would be more accurate to say pernickety) disapproval of men, manners, and ideas. I would not for a momen...

Probably no writer of our time has said more things about the art of literature which are at once new and incontrovertible than Mr. T. S. Eliot has said. He has written very little. His criticism is contained in "The Sacred Wood," a small book, and in "Homage to John Dryden," a still smaller one. With every subject he has attempted he has only made a beginning, said a few pregnant or subversive words, and stopped. His criticisms of Dante, Blake, Swinburne, and Dryden have the app...

The English verse dramatists sought to restore verse plays to their central place in the English theatre. T. S. Eliot began with certain advantages over poets like Claudel and Yeats because he had already brought back ordinary words and situations into poetry. Even so he experienced the inevitable difficulties of getting modern characters to speak verse convincingly…. Eliot saw his task as twofold: to overcome the prejudice against verse in the theatre and to prevent the enjoyment of verse for itself...

In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism I encountered a circumspect sincerity that acted upon me like a challenge: I found I was forced, as I read, to consider afresh what I thought about certain poets and the criteria which at different times have been applied to poetry. (pp. 126-27) These lectures deal directly with the criticism of poetry and indirectly with poetry itself; their subject is the relation of criticism to poetry.

Eliot's interest in Dante and his use of allusions to Dante in The Waste Land are too well known to need further documentation. However, there is one allusion which has been overlooked and which reinforces the theme of sexual sterility and lack of proper love in the modern world. In the last verse paragraph of section one of The Waste Land …, "The Burial of the Dead," Eliot, in his notes, identifies two allusions to the Inferno. Line 63, "I had not thought death had undone...

The Eliot of 'Gerontion' and 'The Hollow Men' … is a quasi-Absentist, his protagonists the seeming victims of an incapacitated faith. The poems tempt us to share despair—at least they feel their way into it with a relish. At the same time they allow us to infer that not faith but the protagonists are to blame. They may be said to refer Christian belief to the reader and even to judge and as it were wait to receive the repentant speakers, who meanwhile enjoy their ba...

Whether Ulysses had such overpowering influence on The Waste Land that the latter is in effect a parody of the former is a point that need not be decided here; Joyce thought it did, but he was touchy in these matters, and even if he was right, hardly anyone connected the two works till many years after both were published. The basic fact that Ulysses made a tremendous impression on Eliot is beyond question, and nobody did more to make it clear than Eliot himself. His friends were amazed; for the first time ...