[Perhaps the most influential poet and critic to write in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot is closely identified with many of the qualities denoted by the term Modernism: experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. He introduced a number of terms and concepts that strongly affected critical thought in his lifetime, among them the idea that poets must be conscious of the living tradition of literature in order for their work to have artistic and spiritual validity. In general, Eliot upheld values of traditionalism and discipline, and in 1928 he annexed Christian theology to his overall conservative world view. Of his criticism, he stated: "It is a by-product of my private poetry-workshop: or a prolongation of the thinking that went into the formation of my verse." In the following excerpt from a review of Edmund Blunden's On the Poems of Henry Vaughan: Characteristics and Intimations (1927), Eliot comments about various aspects of Vaughan's poetic accomplishment, taking issue throughout with Blunden 's inflated view of it.]

There is apt to prevail a critical misconception about any poet who is also suspected of being a mystic. The question whether a poet is a mystic is not, for literary criticism, a question at all. The question is, how far are the poetry and the mysticism one thing? Poetry is mystical when it intends to convey, and succeeds in conveying, to the reader (at the same time that it is real poetry) the statement of a perfectly definite experience which we call the mystical experience. And if it is real poetry it will convey this experience in some degree to every reader who genuinely feels it as poetry. Instead of being obscure, it will be pellucid. I do not care to deny that good poetry can be at the same time a sort of cryptogram of a mysticism only visible to the initiate; only, in that case, the poetry and the mysticism will be two different things. Some readers have professed to discover in Vaughan the traces of an hermetic philosophy of profound depths. It may be there; if so, it belongs not to literature but to cryptography. The mystical element in Vaughan which belongs to his poetry is there for any one to see; it is "mysticism" only by a not uncommon extension of the term. A genuine mystical statement is to be found in the last canto of the Paradiso; this is primarily great poetry. An equally genuine mysticism is expressed in the verses of St John of the Cross; this is not a statement, but a riddling expression; it belongs to great mysticism, but not to great poetry. Vaughan is neither a great mystic nor a very great poet; but he has a peculiar kind of feeling which Mr Blunden is qualified to appreciate.

Vaughan is in some ways the most modern—that is to say, the most nineteenth-century—of the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. He has much more in common with the age to which Mr Blunden belongs than Donne, or Crashaw, or Herbert, or Benlowes. A poem to which Mr Blunden seems particularly attached is "The Retreat," the poem of Vaughan which has become famous as the precursor of the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" of Wordsworth. The comparison is of course (it is a tradition of criticism, not an invention of Mr Blunden's) unfair to Vaughan and to Wordsworth also. The two poems have little in common; Wordsworth's "Ode" is a superb piece of verbiage, and Vaughan's poem is a simple and sincere statement of feeling. But Mr Blunden's praise of this poem, and praise of this sort of poetry which is reminiscent of childhood and its imagined radiance, is significant of the weakness of both Vaughan and Blunden.

Lamb's dream in prose, 'The Child Angel,' appears to have turned upon a reminiscence of Vaughan…. There is a general strange corre spondence between the essay and the poem; yet not so strange, for what was Elia by his own confession but a man in love with his childhood?

And so forth; but it does not occur to Mr Blunden that this love of one's own childhood, a passion which he appears to share with Lamb and Vaughan, is anything but a token of greatness. We all know the mood; and we can all, if we choose to relax to that extent, indulge in the luxury of reminiscence of childhood; but if we are at all mature and conscious, we refuse to indulge this weakness to the point of writing and poetizing about it; we know that it is something to be buried and done with, though the corpse will from time to time find its way up to the surface. About Charles Lamb I know little, and care less; but this reminiscent humour of Vaughan, upon which Mr Blunden has pounced so delightedly, has always seemed to me one of the reasons for his inferiority to the best of his contemporaries. It is not a common weakness at that time; it is rather prophetic; and it can be recognized and diagnosed by any one who has read Rousseau's Confessions. "The very word young," Mr Blunden tells us complacently, "is henceforward charged with a yearning pathos in his mind"; and that yearning pathos, we might add, is exactly the material out of which poetry is not made. Vaughan's apparent love of the country and country life, presently connected by Mr Blunden with his yearning pathos of childhood, comes also to assume a neurasthenic complexion; and the fact that Vaughan was a stout Royalist, with some experience of civil scuffling, and a stout Anglican, does not atone for it. Even Vaughan's religion is a little suspect; Mr Blunden apologizes for such severity as Vaughan displays in the matter of feasts and revels; and Vaughan's Anglicanism is far from the cheerfulness and democracy of Laud, and rather near to a sombre Welsh non-conformity.

Vaughan is in some ways more nineteenth century than most of his contemporaries. On the other hand, Vaughan does belong to his own time. He employs the conceit, though with a difference, and the conceit is not merely a negligible affectation of seventeenth-century poets; it represents a particular way of thinking and feel-century poets; it represents a particular way of thinking and feeling: Vaughan is related to poets who have little in common with Mr Blunden. And it is impossible to understand or place or value any poet of this time without saturating oneself in all of the poets of this time. Thus Mr Blunden appears to understand Vaughan so long as he confines himself to Vaughan; but the one comparison that he draws is by no means fortunate. He admits, what is certain, that Vaughan owed much to the work of George Herbert; but he considers that Herbert is inferior to Vaughan…. No poet, of all that age, ever brought his quaintness more exactly to the verge of pure simplicity than George Herbert; and no poet of that passionately religious time wrote such fine devotional verse…. To appreciate Herbert's sensibility we have to penetrate the thought and emotion of the time; we should know Andrewes and Hooker. In short, the emotion of Herbert is clear, definite, mature, and sustained; whereas the emotion of Vaughan is vague, adolescent, fitful, and retrogressive. This judgement is excessively harsh; but it is only as much as to say that Mr Blunden, like some persons of vague thinking and mild feeling, yearns towards a swooning ecstasy of pantheistic confusion. Vaughan is a true poet; and he wrote fine lines that no one else has written; but his best qualities are those which he shares with other and greater poets of his time, rather than those which he shares with Mr Blunden.