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 copious illustration and analysis of illustration; and his conception of poetic orthodoxy and the hierarchy of poets which he has arranged according to it may be said to have supplanted Arnold's. (pp. 160-61)

His characteristic virtue lies less in perspective than in that close study of the poetic text of which he was, in English, the inaugurator, and in the extraordinary kind of critical wit by which he compares, by virtue of a special, shared quality or category, historically and sometimes stylistically dissimilar poets—for example, Mallarmé and Dryden.

The critical instruments he once named as chief—analysis and comparison—he has used with exemplary skill. If his interest has gradually shifted from intrinsic criticism, it has been a shift of emphasis rather than a repudiation. The total effect of consecutively rereading Eliot's remarkable criticism—written over a considerable time, and chiefly 'occasional'—is to be surprised far less by disjunction than by continuity and development.

The conversion of Eliot to Christianity, and specifically Anglicanism, did not interrupt the continuity of his work either in criticism or in poetry. But it did introduce a new element, or concretize an old one, which required time for appropriation and assimilation. (p. 161)

Probably Pascal's Pensées was, more than any other single book, the instrument of the conversion; certainly the introduction to the Thoughts which Eliot wrote for 'Everyman's Library' (1931) remains not only the finest single religious essay he ever wrote but the nearest to that statement which … he was never willing to offer of his 'grounds' for the adoption of an intellectual position distancing him from so many former allies. (pp. 162-63)

The immediate effect of his conversion on Eliot as a prose writer was strong, and marked, for something like the next ten years…. [Thoughts after Lambeth] has its technical interest to the ecclesiastical and the social historian, and does much to define Eliot's particular, carefully thought out and by no means extravagant brand of Catholic ('High Church') Anglicanism; but in the company of the other pieces in his 460 page Selected Essays, it seems rather grotesquely out of place—both sectarian and provincial.

The same cannot be said of the paper on "Religion and Literature" … called The Faith That Illuminates (1935). The first paragraph contains the propositional statements that "Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint."… And "The greatness" of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by "literary standards." (There are two questions, one of the genuineness of literature, a matter for aesthetic judgment, and another, that of rank, which requires the addition of ethical and theological judgments.) At least, this must be the case with "all Christians."

This essay attempts the work of a treatise, raises more questions than it answers, and seems at many points in contradiction to Eliot's statements elsewhere. For example, it seems to divide literature into form and style on the one hand and content and philosophy on the other. And of the two rival views, that art is an imitation which 'catharsizes' and that art is an imitation which incites to imitation, that art is propaganda, Eliot here comes down heavily on the latter side. His strongest point (not original, of course, though he seems to make it as though it were) is that it is popular novels—read passively and for amusement, which may have "the greatest and least suspected influence upon us" (with its corollary, implied not stated, that it is people who read and have read little, the relatively uneducated, who are most affected by the books they chance to read, making, as they do, the least distinction between 'life' and art). (pp. 164-65)

[Notes towards a Definition of Culture] is probably the most considered and reasonable defense of Conservatism now available. It proposes a state in which an elite of intellect and talent, necessarily uncontinuous, is counterbalanced by a hereditary aristocracy, representing both continuity and character, such social responsibility as is approximately transmissible. It sensibly holds that the highest kind of education cannot be given to all, that the degree as well as kind of education will have to be determined by class, both social and intellectual: equality is not justice. And it maintains that a community is bound together by its culture (which is the incarnation in customs and sensibility of its real as distinct from its avowed religion): popular culture (culture in the anthropological sense) is continuous with and finds intellectual articulation in the culture of the upper classes. And, finally, the Notes best exposits the view, long implicit in Eliot's writings, that the modern National State represents but one stage in the ordered series which extends from the village to the region…. Large grandiose 'universals' (in which principles unite) and governments which are 'representative' must be balanced against local and regional governments with direct participation and corresponding regional cultures. The book includes no practical suggestions as to how to bring about such a State. It is the presentation of an Idea of Society still partially exemplified by England …; it is a plea to save and preserve what remains of an everywhere threatened order, and an attempt intellectually to define the principles which, however imperfectly, such an order exemplifies.

This book, which has had intellectual commendation even from those in little sympathy with its ideas, is probably the best of Eliot's writings on subjects outside the range of his professional competences. (pp. 168-69)

In 1957 Eliot published On Poetry and Poets, a collection of literary-critical essays written subsequently to those in Selected Essays, originally published in 1932. Like its predecessor, this book is the author's own selection; and another critic may regret both inclusions and omissions….

But with this puzzlement over inclusions and exclusions one is familiar. The impressive and reassuring thing about On Poetry is its evidence that, though his sense of social responsibility—what might be called his assumption of the full Arnoldian role—had increased, Eliot showed himself continuingly capable of literary judgment and discernment. (p. 170)

In the essay on "Johnson as a Critic and Poet," Eliot has provided a really superior piece of literary-historical criticism, so exemplary in method that one wishes he had written more such studies…. The method consists of applying to a group of 'period' poems the critical theory and standards of the great critic of the period…. The attempt is to understand Johnson's praise, together with its reserves, and to apply both to a poem, or a passage from a poem, by the poet at hand. Such an exercise, like studies in 'sources and influences' which transcend the mechanical, is work not for apprentices but for the most sensitive and mature scholar-critic. (pp. 171-72)

Three more essays in On Poetry require special attention. They are distinctly 'later' essays; lack the brilliance and audacity of the early masterpieces, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "The Metaphysical Poets," and "Andrew Marvell." They develop and bring to fulfillment another side of Eliot, present from the start in that first book of essays, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, with its critical essays on poets and its critical essays on critics. Eliot was a criticizer of the critics from the beginning; and he learned the art of criticism from the critics as he learned the art of poetry from the poets. The three 'later essays' are "What Is Minor Poetry?" and "What Is a Classic?"—both of 1944, and "The Frontiers of Criticism" (1956). I. A. Richards might well have illustrated by these essays the fine remark he made in a memorial characterization of Eliot: "Few minds have more enjoyed the process of pondering a discrimination: pondering it rather than formulating it or maintaining it…." These essays are such ponderings.

The 1944 essays form a kind of pair, and complement each other, both having to do with both order and hierarchy. They complement, but there is no neat matching or correspondence; for 'major,' and not 'classic,' is the strict antonym of 'minor.' There hovers the distinction between genuine literature, whatever its rank, and 'great' literature, a distinction which is never quite precipitated: we may infer that all classics must be great literature though not all great books are classics. (pp. 172-73)

It is much to be doubted that, even when Eliot called himself a "classicist in literature," he meant by classicism anything more specific than 'critical perspective.' He certainly never called his own poetry 'classical.'… To be a 'classical' poet in an unclassical age (i.e., an age which has no "common style" because it has no coherent culture) is necessarily different from being a classical poet in a classical age.

Of the dictionary senses of 'classic,' Eliot certainly intends, in ["What Is a Classic?"], the primary—of the first class, that excellence in whatever sphere which gives the standard from which all other classes derive their degree of subordination. But, assuming that, he offers as the one word which suggests the maximum meaning of the term for him, the word maturity; and this is so ultimate a concept that it cannot be defined except circularly: we have to assume that 'mature' hearers already know what maturity means. Its concrete primary meaning is organic, agricultural, biological, psychological; then, by natural extension, it is applied to civilization, to language, to literature—perhaps to philosophy as 'view of life.'… Eliot recognizes that "to make the meaning of maturity really apprehensible—indeed, even to make it acceptable—to the immature, is perhaps impossible."

These are understatements. In the world Eliot lived in, and we live in, even should there by any general agreement on what persons and cultures, and what works of art, are 'mature,' there are many barbarians, and some art connoisseurs, who clearly and expressly prefer primitivism and the archaic or the decadent, the underripe or the overripe. What argument against, or with, such? What argument, indeed, can there be about 'first principles'? And it is with first principles that Eliot is concerned in this essay—the first principles of theory, or of conviction, which lie behind or beneath all profitable practical criticism.

This essay is Eliot's most seriously felt and coherently thought out attempt at latter-day statement of his total position—the widest in scope and the least sectarian. It covers, and brings together, the aesthetic and the ethical, manners and language, tradition and the individual poetic talent as he had not succeeded in doing since that first famous and 'classic' essay with which he began his career. (pp. 174-75)

["The Frontiers of Criticism"] did not, at least upon first reading, please Eliot's fellow critics. It appeared a lowering of the seriousness with which their common pursuit had been followed in The Sacred Wood; Eliot, who had done so much to inaugurate and dignify literary criticism, appeared now trying to demote it. The 'close reading' of poems, which his own poetry required, and which his own criticism of poetry had exemplified, was now called, at least as practiced by the younger academics, "the lemon-squeezer school of criticism." Further, he appeared to dismiss his theoretical essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by the reference to "a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world," and he limited the best of his "literary criticism" to essays on poets and poetic dramatists who had influenced him, the by-products of his "private poetry-workshop." The old dogmatism and audacity are absent from this lecture as well as the close writing of "The Metaphysical Poets." Eliot has become so tolerant, even appreciative, of the varieties of literary criticism, so willing to extend the "frontiers" … that we may forget (what comes out clearly in the pendant "To Criticize the Critic") that for him the center of the country, the farthest from frontier peril, remains the criticism of poetry written by a poet. (p. 176)

Perhaps the real surprise of the [essay] lies in its assertion … that a literary critic need not be "purely" literary…. Like the poet himself, he must have other interests; "for the literary critic is not merely a technical expert …: the critic must be the whole man, a man with convictions and principles, and knowledge and experience of life"—a definition with which no humanist can disagree. Such a man would indeed be what Eliot desiderated in the opening essay of The Sacred Wood….

["To Criticize the Critic"] reviews Eliot's own literary criticism, both practical and theoretical, his essays on particular poets and poet-dramatists and those on theory of poetry and theory of criticism. (p. 177)

Eliot clearly asserts that he does not think of himself as the "philosophical critic" like Richards, or "the Critic as Moralist" like Dr. Leavis, or the "Professional Critic" like his friend P. E. More, but as the poet-critic whose criticism is a "by-product of his creative activity." In his opinion, indeed, his own criticism has not had, and could not have had, "any influence whatever" apart from the poems; and he is certain that he has written best about the writers who have influenced his own poetry…. (p. 178)

As for his theorizing, he was never doing more than generalizing his own sensibility, his own tastes; and the celebrated phrases like "dissociation of sensibility" and "objective correlative" were but "conceptual symbols for emotional preferences."

On the topic of Continuity and Coherence in his critical thought and writing, he has his own opinion to give. He objects to having forty years of 'occasional' writing reduced to simultaneous existence…. He found, as any critic will, in rereading his own old work, views he now maintains "with less firmness of conviction," or only with reservations, statements the meaning of which he no longer understands, and some matters in which he has simply lost interest, even in whether he still holds the same belief or not—in other words, shifts of interest and of emphasis; but no radical break or disastrous incoherence. (p. 179)

Even before Eliot's death, there began to exist a large amount of interpretative commentary on his criticism—as well as his poetry; and there has been very considerable disagreement among able fellow critics, including Ransom, Tate, Winters, and Leavis. The issues disputed are, principally, the degree to which Eliot's religious conversion altered his critical position: whether, from being a purely aesthetic critic he became a moral one, or a combination of both; and whether, if there was a change, it was a break or a shift of emphasis; then, whether Eliot's criticism is full of self-contradictions, or, instead, reasonably coherent, or even—in essence, if not in form of presentation—methodical and coherent enough to be called systematic; and, finally, perhaps, whether the prime value of his criticism lies in its theory, or theoretical implications, or whether it lies rather in his corruscation of 'insights.' (p. 180)

[However, it] is impossible to deny that, despite a flexible terminology and shifts in emphasis, there is, throughout Eliot's work, a substantial unity and coherence of thought; if not a system of conscious thought, then a coherence of conscience and 'sensibility,' a persistent Strebung toward a structural articulation of a serious man's emotions, feelings, perceptions, and purposes.

This must not be read as a 'strategy' or a 'program,' or rendered too conscious. If Eliot had ambitions to system-building, he would certainly have taken pains to read over his own earlier work and retrospectively explain or justify at least seeming contradictions and inconsistencies: his repeated statements, till the last essay, that he has not read over his earlier work, seem arrogant on the part of a publishing and eminent critic. But his intention was other, I think: he sought for no merely verbal or even overtly logical consistency but one which should depend on the constant maintenance of spiritual integrity. And so, though he treats each of his prose pieces as 'occasional,' his mind is possessed by the occupation with a steady series of central topics. And each time he takes one of these up, he starts afresh to think it out, hoping to advance his development of thought on this topic, and trusting that his mind has such a reasonable degree of continuity and coherence that there will be no really shocking break but some advance, at least some new distinctions and refinements.

Eliot has been called an 'empirical critic,' and so he is. He knew the kind of aesthetician who constructs his categories out of a minimal experience of little-enjoyed artifacts, and had a just horror of such. But an empirical critic is not required to dispense with literary theory—only to make sure that his theories do not go beyond his own literary experience, including (for he is not a solipsist) his experience of the experience of others.

In Eliot's criticism there is, at least in potentia, a theoretical generalization of his experience as so defined, and that is all to the good. But—and there his past (and perhaps more impressionist)—readers have been accurate: the dominant, the crowning achievement lies in the vitality, vivacity, and copiousness of his perceptions and insights—the constant and invigorating sense of a first-rate mind intent upon the process of thinking. (pp. 182-83)

Austin Warren, "Continuity and Coherence in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot" (respective portions reprinted here by permission of the University of Michigan Press and the editors of The Sewanee Review; originally published in a shorter form as "Continuity in T. S. Eliot's Literary Criticism," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXIV, No. 1, Winter, 1966), in his Connections, The University of Michigan Press, 1970, pp. 152-83.