The question sounds eminently reasonable, but remains unanswerable: what is revolutionary in the criticism of T. S. Eliot? Everyone—except apparently Eliot himself—can see that the critical tradition of the whole English-speaking world was turned upside down by the trickle of articles and lectures—there has never, strictly, been a critical book—issuing from his pen since the First World War. But the nature of his influence as a critic has always been felt to be mysterious and indefinable…. Disciples—even enemies—have hardly succeeded in identifying what is new and special in Eliot's criticism, though they have been loud both in praise and censure. The most discreet of major English critics, he has practised evasion and reticence with determined skill. In his earliest period, positions were tentatively stated and argument disarmed by a certain irony; in his middle years, argument was openly spurned; and in the later years, since the Second World War, he elaborately pretended never to have been a major critic at all. Altogether, his critical career might have been planned as a vast hoax to tempt the historian into solemnities for the sport of Philistines.

The key to Eliot's reticence as a critic surely lies in the relationship between his criticism and his poetry. In a sense, his criticism is a smoke-screen to the rest of his career. It misleads as much as it reveals about the quality of his poems, and the smoke-screen grows thicker as the years pass. By the 1950s Eliot's determination to hide himself from the devotees of his poetry by means of critical red-herrings had grown so obvious as to suggest a possible motive: the intense love of privacy, perhaps, of a fastidious New Englander whose poetry has led him into the indignity of spiritual self-exposure. (pp. 168-69)

The formal properties of Eliot's criticism, at least, are clear enough, and may be summarily described. An Eliot essay is a statement of an attitude, a prise de position, an evaluation. It does not even pretend to be biographical, in the sense that an Arnold essay so pretends: Arnold's claim to be a disciple of Sainte-Beuve gives way, with Eliot, to a frankly unhistorical insistence upon the immediacy of certain poets here and now, and Eliot hardly ever stoops to purvey information. Secondly, 'relevance' refers to modern poets rather than to modern readers…. Thirdly, Eliot eschews close analysis in favour of general judgements; his taste and techniques were formed decades before the New Criticism of the thirties, and he never practises the 'close analysis' characteristic of that school.

These are hardly arguable statements about Eliot's criticism. They go a very little way, however, toward describing what an Eliot essay is like. To do that would require a more impressionistic account, leading to statements that might prove highly debatable, since the rhetoric of his criticism is opaque enough to leave a good deal in doubt. What does seem clear is that Eliot is Arnold's successor in terms of the audience he expects for criticism: a minority audience, aware of itself as a cultural leadership, and peculiarly vulnerable, like Arnoldians, to the seductions of intellectual snobbery. It might be unfair to attribute to Eliot himself the stock-market approach to literary values that characterizes a good many of his followers; but certainly, in this regard, Eliot finishes what Arnold began. A price-scale of values for an intellectual élite among the dead poets, of a kind that would certainly have puzzled Dryden, Johnson, and Coleridge, is part of the Eliot inheritance, however little he may like it. But the object of Eliot's criticism is not just an Addisonian ambition to correct taste: more narrowly, it is the correction of taste with a view to influencing his own future readership and audiences. (pp. 169-70)

The originality of his essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', with which his critical career effectively begins, lies not in its anti-liberalism but in its application of that fashionable doctrine to the immediate critical situation. It is … evidently an unofficial manifesto of Eliot's criticism, or an account of the principles the young critic planned to bring to bear upon English poetry….

'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is not the kind of essay that invites open discussion. Its tone is drily pontifical, and Eliot's distaste for debate and free speech is firmly suggested in the rhetorical properties of the essay. It asks not to be examined—which is a very good reason for examining it. The deliberate perversities of Eliot's use of language are part of the Arnoldian minority-appeal of the essay…. (p. 171)

Contempt for historical criticism is confirmed in Eliot's argument as it develops: poets do not express themselves in poetry, but escape from themselves by 'a continual extinction of personality'; so that historical criticism, by implication, is convicted of looking for the wrong things. It looks to the poet and his historical situation, whereas the poem itself points away from both towards some ideal of impersonal truth…. (p. 172)

What Eliot calls 'the historical sense' … can be grouped among other attacks upon the historiography of literature in the age that followed Arnold. But Eliot's real historical sense is not to be dismissed: it is far finer than Arnold's, who often seems to live and think in a straitjacket of mid-Victorian enlightenment. There are plenty of passages in The Sacred Wood, and even later, notably in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, that make one wonder what a delicately intuitive historian of literature was lost in Eliot. In the early essays, attacks on the historical principle, and examples of acute historical judgement, coexist oddly in the same passage…. (p. 173)

Eliot's critical convictions cannot be said to evolve in any very striking sense. His alleged change of heart over Milton between 1935 and 1947 is more like a tactical withdrawal under fire; his growing scepticism, as he aged, over the utility of criticism—any criticism—certainly modifies his tone of voice, but hardly his deepest convictions about literature…. Eliot did not have to become older to learn that the past is not a mere sequence. It is all in The Sacred Wood. Still, preoccupations change where theologies do not, and if there are few Eliot juvenilia and no dramatic changes in front, the mass of his five hundred essays, reviews and published lectures still falls comfortably enough into three periods, not unlike the Arnoldian dialectic of the two literary periods separated by an intermediate decade of social interests. Eliot's career evolved in a broadly similar way: from the first, pre-Christian decade (1919–28) of literary preoccupation, mainly with sixteenth and seventeenth-century dramatists and poets in The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays (1924), and For Lancelot Andrewes (1928); through a second decade of social and religious criticism (1929–39) following on his conversion and his final break with 'modernism', in Dante (1929), Thoughts after Lambeth (1931), After Strange Gods (1934); to the post war Olympian period, which marks a certain renewal of interest in critical (especially dramatic) issues, though hardly in the concentrated form of the first decade. It already seems clear … that any serious estimate of Eliot as a critic must depend upon the early essays. Stiff, sly, and pompous as their language sometimes is, they are none the less even-tempered, conscientious, and exploratory, and Eliot's frigid distaste for debate is less evident here, and less damaging, than in his later writings. Reshaped as Selected Essays in 1932, and since enlarged, the early essays are a nearly complete monument to his genius as a critic. (pp. 174-75)

What unites the essays [in The Sacred Wood] is not any doctrine of the 'integrity' of poetry, but of its availability. Eliot behaves towards the dead poets of Europe with all the casual skill of a shoplifter in a department store. He knows what he wants and what he can use, and he seizes upon it as coolly as if no established scale of values already existed among the English poets. He arrives at his views by a process of unhurried irreverence, gently defining what he means (and, very characteristically, what he does not mean), and concluding with judgements which are readily felt to be radical and vaguely momentous…. [In] general, only the most masterly and refined rhetorical analysis could explain how much contrives to be suggested in these essays, as against how relatively little is openly stated, and how powerful and 'insidious' … is the youthful irreverence that inspires them…. ['Rule] of succession by the sword', by which a runaway slave might make his bid for a precarious liberty, provides a key to the unity of Eliot's first critical essays. A youthful poet turns critic to justify his own place in the line of succession, to stake a claim. He is priest and murderer. Perhaps the metaphor is doubly suggestive: Eliot, the new priest of the 'tradition', inherits by a kind of critical massacre, belittling the rights of dead poets to historical existences and boldly plundering their remains. (pp. 176-78)

The plunder of the new priest-king in the essays of the twenties, is various, but mainly Elizabethan in The Sacred Wood, Metaphysical and Restoration in the collections that follow. The Renaissance emphasis is in itself a little surprising: in a literary sense Eliot is so much the child of Arnold … that one might have expected him to echo Arnold's youthful horror of 'those d—d Elizabethans'. But it is still possible to guess why he did not. In the first place, though a Francophile like Arnold, he shared none of Arnold's distaste for English civilization as such. In criticism and in poetry Eliot is a British patriot…. Only those who insist upon reading Eliot as total irony will deny the note of infatuation with an age which British nationalists are irresistibly led to glorify…. And secondly, Eliot sees in the Elizabethans and their successors qualities invisible to Arnold. Arnold thought them responsible for the confused and fragmentary quality of English romanticism: Eliot, very characteristically, sees them not as historical influences at all, but simply as a school where the apprentice-poet can learn his craft…. The more outrageously out of fashion the poet, indeed, the better Eliot seems to like the notion of finding a use for him: Tennyson and Swinburne are respectfully handled, for example, Shelley and Keats not. (pp. 178-79)

The celebrated hint in the first of these essays—it is hardly elaborate enough to be called a theory—of a 'dissociation of sensibility', of thought from sensation, is best studied in this light: that of Eliot's own poetic ambitions in the twenties. It identifies a breach he sought to heal:

A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility … [But] in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.

Eliot's majestic historical sense suddenly reveals two systems of vast correspondences, a poetical tradition tragically split beyond a point where romanticism could help. But his own use of the theory seems out of touch with the theory itself. We should have expected Milton and Dryden to be judged as equal offenders: but in fact Milton is ignored until 1935 and then lightly dismissed, Dryden celebrated in an early essay of 1921 as a mentor for poets of today and tomorrow…. Dryden, for all his 'commonplace mind', is useful as a verbal quarry for Eliot and poets like Eliot. Milton is not.

Eliot's two lectures on Milton, like his essays on poetic drama, overlap the second period of political and theological interests, and even the third, exhausted phase of critical activity. They take tone and colour from the fact that they are belated. Both are written in a convoluted style of qualification and reservation that grows more complex with the years …; and it is only by a narrow margin that the first lecture can be called an exercise in the qualified rejection of Milton, or the second one of qualified assent. By the thirties, negatives and limiting judgements settle thickly upon the prose of Eliot—'by this I do not mean to say that …' 'perhaps', 'somewhat'. Argument advances crabwise: the Milton of the first lecture is called 'a very great poet indeed', but 'a bad influence'. But to be a bad influence is not necessarily 'a serious charge'. But Milton's poetry 'could only be an influence for the worse, upon any poet whatever', and the twentieth-century poet too must struggle against it. And then, startlingly, Eliot shows his hand:

The kind of derogatory criticism that I have to make upon Milton is not intended for such persons who cannot understand that it is more important, in some vital respects, to be a good poet than to be a great poet….

It is Eliot's rooted assumption that criticism is an aid to his own career as a poet, rather than any intuition of a 'dissociation of sensibility', that governs his choices here. A good poet is one who, like Dryden, is useful to later 'poetical practitioners'; a great poet, such as Milton, may lack the merits of the salvageable. (pp. 179-81)

The Sacred Wood, then, though it remains the nub of Eliot's achievement as a critic, offers only elusive hints concerning his system of values, and few certainties beyond an intuition of his egoistical purpose in using criticism as 'a by-product of my private poetry-workshop' with the object of judging and rejecting the work of the past by the standards of his own immediate needs as a poet. Certainties followed, in the second decade (1929–39), but they were of a kind to alarm his disciples and darken a reputation in an age even more starkly controversial than the 1860's. It is easy now to see that the bright young people of the twenties, for whom a volume of Eliot's poems, and even The Sacred Wood, had talismanic force, had failed to note the illiberal echoes in Eliot's first works. They are faint, but they are there: the contrast posed between a heroic past and a decadent present, the distaste for argument, the contempt for cosmopolitanism, the references easily interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as anti-Semitic…. Looking back, one can see as inevitable a schism between master and disciples which left the disciples with a sense of angry betrayal, and the master with some sense of relief. Eliot, like Arnold, preferred to walk by himself.

Eliot's second period opens with a delightfully disarming prelude, the monograph Dante (1929), a frankly amateurish, enthusiastic introduction to Dante for readers who possess little Italian, and the kind of book that no one could dislike. Eliot's love for Dante, infectiously suggested, looks literary rather than neo-scholastic, a poet's rather than a convert's enthusiasm. An ensuing pamphlet, Thoughts after Lambeth (1931), collected, like Dante, in the Selected Essays of 1932, is a sensible and moderate comment on the Anglican conference of 1930, but sets its face firmly against humanism in its conclusion…. [The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)] is a sketchy, occasionally suggestive survey of poets as critics from Sidney to I. A. Richards, but the shades are falling. This is the Lenten period of his career, to stretch his own metaphor. Eliot is already half bored with poetry, and more than half bored with criticism, and intensely bored with his own role as poet-critic. (pp. 181-83)

[After Strange Gods] is the oddest of Eliot's books, and certainly the most difficult to justify. Perhaps it is a fulfilment of the promise made in a footnote in the Use of Poetry … where after quoting Jacques Maritain on 'the unconcealed and palpable influence of the devil' on many writers of the time, Eliot adds solemnly: 'With the influence of the devil on contemporary literature I shall be concerned in more detail in another book.'… The austere subtitle to After Strange Gods—'A Primer of Modern Heresy'—strikes a certain inquisitorial chill, and refusals to discuss grow ever more explicit and insistent…. The lectures [in this book] take as their starting-point the fifteen-year-old essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', and we are made to understand the neo-conservative seduction of a word which, in the early essay, seems strikingly and deliberately incongruous. Eliot's poetic tradition had nothing to do with a historical sequence: his political tradition has. There is praise for the tradition of the Old South and for the resurrectionist group of neo-agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, for old New England…. The two lectures that follow are a diatribe against free inquiry and the sinister effects of the modern movement … and against the novels of George Eliot, Hardy, Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence…. With this book, offered not as literary criticism but as an attack upon a wider range of views then currently fashionable, Eliot's tragic break with the dominant impulses of his age was declared total and permanent.

The third period of Eliot's activity as a critic, since the Second World War, is profoundly anti-climactic. There is little attempt to renew the anti-liberal controversies of the thirties, but his return to literary issues seems only half-convinced. Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) only palely reflects a pre-war concern for intellectual values in a stable society. Poetry and Drama (1951) and The Three Voices of Poetry (1953) suggest a spark of enthusiasm for a poetic drama which has its roots deep in the Elizabethan essays of The Sacred Wood; but the despairingly high ideal of achieving a 'musical order' in language 'without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with which drama must come to terms', as in Shakespeare's last plays, is, on his own telling, unattainable, and his later plays are distinguished flops. The dominant tone of his last essays and lectures is sarcastic and irritable, and the target is usually the very criticism his own examples created. Like a startled Frankenstein, Eliot recoils from the monster he has created, wearily disclaiming responsibility: 'I fail to see any critical movement which can be said to derive from myself,' as he told a Midwestern audience in 1956. (pp. 183-85)

These, then, are the three voices of T. S. Eliot the critic: first, the youthful, exploratory enthusiasm of the twenties, where an almost ideal balance between poetic and critical activity is realized; second, an abortive career of social and religious advocacy in frankly obscurantist causes; and third, a bold but exhausted attempt to recover the creative urge, followed at once by denial and desperation. The imposing sense of a vast critical intelligence that emerges, especially in the twenties, is not of a sort that can be defined and codified, and the question with which this chapter began must remain unanswered. Eliot made English criticism look different, but in no simple sense. He offered it a new range of rhetorical possibilities, confirmed it in its increasing contempt for historical processes, and yet reshaped its notion of period by a handful of brilliant intuitions. It is not to be expected that so expert and professional an observer of poetry should allow his achievement to be more neatly classified than this. (pp. 185-86)