Selected Essays, 1917-1932

Selected Essays, 1917-1932 | Critical Overview

Although Ezra Pound and a few other radicals were supportive from the start, critics tended to resent or ignore the early essays anthologized in SelectedEssays, 1917-1932. Arthur Waugh's ‘‘The New Poetry'' called his poems "un-metrical, incoherent banalities'' with "no steady current of ideas behind them.'' Waugh represents a group of critics who did not take Eliot's literary theory seriously.

But, by the time Eliot published Selected Essays, 1917-1932 in 1932, he was already an extremely well-established critic. Some resented Eliot, as an American, telling the English what to...

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