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.

Mr Eliot points out that the answers to the question, 'What is poetry?' which posits the critical function, have for the most part been answers to other questions, 'What is the use of poetry?' 'What ought poetry to do for us?' He has not attempted to define poetry himself; I think he thinks it undefinable. He has shown (and he has done it with admirable cogency and clearness) what critics at different periods have expected of poetry, and how, accordingly, the estimation of different kinds of poetry has varied….

[Some] passages suggest that Mr Eliot believes that there is an 'eternal' poetry, separable from any alloy which made it appeal to contemporaries, and that criticism (progress by the elimination of errors) in time must help us to identify it…. However, in yet another place and speaking in dissent, he also says:

People tend to believe that there is just some one essence of poetry, for which we can find the formula, and that poets can be ranged according to their possession of a greater or less quantity of this essence.

This looks like a contradiction—unless Mr Eliot means us, in the last quotation, to lay particular stress on the proviso 'for which we can find a formula'. In that case the sentence might be read, not as a contradiction, but as an admission that we could sense this 'essence' or 'permanent element' in different poets, though unable to formulate it. But the context hardly allows of that interpretation. We are therefore left in doubt how far we can agree with him, whatever our views on this point may be. (pp. 127-28)

It does not seem to me stultifying to conclude from reviewing the world's literature that there is nothing in poetry to which all ages will respond…. The very fact that Mr Eliot, who has such deep affiliations with our own time, cannot refrain from cooling our response to Keats and Coleridge, and chilling it to the bone towards Shelley and Arnold, indicates that good poets may meet with, at any rate, interims of comparative indifference.

In one passage in his criticism of Matthew Arnold (both as a poet and a critic he defines him as an example of 'false stability'), he speaks of his lack of 'auditory imagination'; and his definition of what he means by this arresting expression is particularly interesting because Mr Eliot is evidently writing about what he cares for most himself in poetry, and seeks himself when he writes as a poet…. Then he adds—he has been discussing Arnold's dictum that poetry is at bottom criticism of Life—'Arnold's notion of life does not perhaps go deep enough'. He has said this before more emphatically; and this aversion—equally marked in the case of Addison and Goethe, whom he cannot bring himself to treat with intellectual charity—from the poetry springing from what he regards as a 'false stability', leads him into actually misreading Arnold's view of the function of poetry. (pp. 129-30)

Arnold never said that life was at bottom 'criticism'; he said that 'poetry was at bottom a criticism of life'. The definition is not philosophically exact, but it is striking that Mr Eliot, throughout these lectures, uses it himself as a test of the different achievements of poets. (p. 130)

Throughout these lectures there runs a scornful denial that poetry and art are or can ever possibly be substitutes for religion. This underlies Mr Eliot's dislike of Goethe, Shelley, Arnold, whose work in different ways, though they rejected God, seemed to offer a substitute. 'Nothing in this world or the next', says Mr Eliot, 'is a substitute for anything else; and if you find you must do without something such as religious faith or philosophic belief, then you must do without it'. True. But poetry can help us to do one thing which religion helps us to do, to love life spiritually, that is to say, intelligently and disinterestedly. He does not discuss this, though he discusses many important things, beautifully, sincerely. (pp. 131-32)