How can a book of criticism be at once so distinguished and so unimportant? The question is the more worth asking because the author of [On Poets and Poetry] was at one time so unquestionably a major critical influence. (p. 177)

The Sacred Wood, I think, had very little influence or attention before the Hogarth Press brought out Homage to John Dryden, the pamphlet in which the title essay was accompanied by 'The Metaphysical Poets' and 'Andrew Marvell'. It was with the publication in this form of those essays … that Eliot became the important contemporary critic. It was the impact of this slender new collection that sent one back to The Sacred Wood and confirmed with decisive practical effect one's sense of the stimulus to be got from that rare thing, a fine intelligence in literary criticism—the fine intelligence so certainly present in the earlier and larger collection. And the nature of the peculiar force of the criticism—the condition of the authority with which it claimed one's attention—was now plain…. Eliot was the man of genius who, after the long post-Swinburnian arrest, altered expression. Such an achievement was possible only to a poet in whom the creative gift was a rare gift of consciousness. An intense and highly conscious work of critical intelligence necessarily preceded and accompanied the discovery of the new uses of words, the means of expressing or creating the new feelings and modes of thought, the new rhythms, the new versification. This is the critical intelligence manifested in those early essays; Eliot's best, his important, criticism has an immediate relation to his technical problems as the poet who, at that moment in history, was faced with 'altering expression'.

Never had criticism a more decisive influence. The poetry would without its aid in any case have compelled recognition; it was the poetry that won attention for the criticism, rather than the other way round. What the criticism did was to insure that recognition of the poetry should be accompanied by a general decisive change, not only of taste, but of critical idea and idiom, of critical approach to questions of 'poetic', and of the sense of the past of English poetry, and of the relation of the past to the present.

It was an impressive achievement. What was not at once apparent to all those impressed was that some of the ideas, attitudes, and valuations put into currency by Eliot were arbitrary: some of the most distinctive and influential neither followed from his best critical insights nor drew any valid authority from the creative successes that seemed to lend them force. The attribution of 'consciousness' to Eliot should not be allowed to mislead. The radically distinctive thing about him, in fact, is that he should have fallen so short of achieving the consciousness that one thinks of as necessary to the great creative writer. The limitation, the disability—it is a case challenging a diagnostic approach—has its ominous document in a famous early essay: 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. It was on this essay pre-eminently that was based Eliot's reputation as a thinker, a disciplined intelligence notably capable of rigorous, penetrating, and sustained thought.

Actually the trenchancy and vigour are illusory and the essay is notable for its ambiguities, its logical inconsequences, its pseudo-precisions, its fallaciousness, and the aplomb of its equivocations and its specious cogency. Its offered compression and its technique in general for generating awed confusion help to explain why it should not have been found easy to deal with. Yet the falsity and gratuitousness of its doctrine of impersonality are surely plain enough. (pp. 177-79)

It clearly is a most significant defeat of intelligence that presents itself to us in Eliot's essay. What pressure, what need, we ask, explains this earnestness of intellectual subtlety devoted in so strenuous a play of trenchancy, confusion, and inconsequence, to absolving the artist from the need to have lived—the need to be a fully living individual wholly committed to life, in whom the impulsion of the lived experience and the courage of responsibility towards it appear as the 'intensity of the artistic process'? We can't help seeing the answer in the co-presence in The Sacred Wood of the essay on Hamlet, which in so odd, confident, and arbitrary a way reduces that tragedy to a matter of an inexpressible emotional state, one of disgust, occasioned in Hamlet by his mother. It isn't that the play doesn't face us with problems. But to assert with so little argument so drastically simplifying an account of it, while relying as for support that makes even the show of first-hand analysis unnecessary on J. M. Robertson, the ironclad Scottish rationalist, and Professor E. E. Stoll—is this, we ask, a manifestation of critically poised and disinterested intelligence? (pp. 181-82)

[Eliot's] work in general as critic has its value in spite of the fact that what one is apt to think of as an essential function of an important critic either hardly comes into the question, or is performed in a way that is far from exemplifying the critic's strength. There is, of course, value-judgment (though not an appraisal of, say, Donne or Marvell or Dryden) entailed in the very effectively directed critical observations by which he established a general taste for the Metaphysicals and a general understanding of its relevance to the appreciation of his own creative achievement. But the force and justice of the limiting suggestions I am making become very plain when we consider his critical dealings with the dramatists. He made some stimulating observations about dramatic verse and the conventions of poetic drama, but no radically intelligent—no truly critical—appraisal of any of the Elizabethans or Jacobeans; he has done, in fact, nothing to disturb at all seriously, where Elizabethan-Jacobean drama is in question, the institutional valuation coming down from Lamb and Swinburne; rather, he has confirmed its inflationary habit.

Eliot's standing as a distinguished critic, then, depends as little on his penetration and sureness in the more important kinds of value-judgment as on his powers of sustained coherent and trenchant thought. His performance as a judge of his contemporaries has been consistently disastrous. It is represented at its most respectable by his backing Joyce—the significance of which election, all the same, is given in his dismissal of Lawrence. The author of The Waste Land … did naturally prefer to the great creative writer of his time, fertile in works that have an irresistible living wholeness, the writer whose ingenuities and pedantries of constructive will are signals of the default of organic life, betraying the failure of imaginative creativity. And I don't doubt, though this seems to me a severe thing to have to say, that his lifelong backing of Wyndham Lewis has represented a genuine taste. Yet I can't believe that he could have committed himself to such extravagant appraisal of this last as a creative writer and a thinker if he hadn't known him personally (one tries to give Eliot credit for a kind of loyalty that isn't at all a virtue in a critic as such), and belonged to a dominant literary-social milieu in which such appraisals were current. What in fact I have come to is the radical conventionality of judgment that contradicts Eliot's distinction as a critic and so disconcertingly qualifies his intelligence. (pp. 184-85)

When in [On Poets and Poetry Eliot] refers to the responsibilities of reviewing and the importance of having literary reviews, or explicitly discusses the characteristics and limitations of contemporary criticism, he gives no sign of recognizing our actual plight: the impossibility of maintaining an intelligent critical journal; the absence of an educated public (the 'small audience') coherent and influential enough to be able to insist on the maintenance of serious standards in the places where the function of criticism is supposed to be nowadays mainly performed—the weeklies and the middle-class Sunday papers. It is hardly conceivable that the criticism of a mind that, for all its distinction, is capable of such a default should have the strength and importance that the distinction at best seems to promise. (p. 194)

I must not, however, be taken to suggest that the defect is no more than a matter of what most directly and obviously relates to his 'conventionality'. We have it, as a characteristic weakness of critical thought, here, where he is writing about 'Johnson as Critic and Poet'.

In our own day, the influence of psychology and sociology upon literary criticism has been very noticeable. On the one hand, these influences of social discipline have enlarged the field of the critic and have affirmed, in a world which otherwise is inclined to depreciate the importance of literature, the relations of literature to life. But from another point of view this enrichment has also been an impoverishment, for the purely literary values, the appreciation of good writing for its own sake, have become submerged when literature is judged in the light of other considerations.

What are 'purely literary values'? I myself am firmly convinced that literature must be judged 'as literature and not as another thing'. Only when it is so judged can sociology and psychology learn from it what they have to learn. But to believe this is not, so far as I can see, to believe in 'purely literary values'…. The quoted passage, in fact, reminds us that the critic is he who wrote 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', with its astonishingly untenable account of the importance of literature and the relations of literature to life. That is, it is the critic whom some radical inner condition makes peculiarly weak in value-judgment.

The manifestation of that weakness in his critical thinking is especially apparent when, in this volume, he discusses his own plays. He says a good deal about the faults of Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party, but gives no sign at all that he is aware of the profounder, the essential, criticisms these works invite—the criticisms that express one's sharpened sense of the importance of literature, and therefore of the relation of literature to life. The discussion of drama in general suffers from the same weakness; the examination of the possibility and the practical problem of poetic drama comes from a mind in which the thinking about matters of form and technique hasn't the life, grapple, and force that critical thought cannot have apart from the habit of full engagement—the habit that manifests itself in the kind of preoccupation with value, significance, and responsibility to life that makes it impossible to talk about 'purely literary values'.

In fact, one cannot escape the sense that Eliot's discussion of his themes is at bottom an insidious way of not really facing the essential responsibility of a critic. And perhaps enough has now been said about the effect of such characteristic things as 'What Is a Classic?': the curious sense one has of a strenuous academic quality; the sense of an intensity of intellectual energy, devoted by the critic and exacted of the reader, incommensurate with any upshot of defined, organized, and profitable thought. (pp. 195-96)