In the following essay excerpt, Weinblatt explores Eliot's efforts to "explore, to make sense out of and to illustrate the implications and consequences of his myth of failed adequation" in Selected Essays.

High theory and the evocation of intensely immediate experience as embodied, respectively, in Eliot's "essays of generalization (such as Tradition and the Individual Talent) and [his] appreciations of individual authors": the drama of Eliot's prose writings, especially of his Selected Essays is, at its most vital, to draw these poles together, to discover their mutuality, to declare them fully complementary facets of the same, common quest for adequation. At first this dramatic movement is not clearly evident. Dipping into Selected Essays at random, finding here the reassuringly familiar essay on "The Metaphysical Poets," there a relatively unknown, seemingly unrelated piece on the Church of England's Lambeth Conference of 1930 ("Thoughts after Lambeth"), the essays seem more...