[However] admirable as finely tempered, self-possessed criticism [Eliot's] Elizabethan essays may appear to scholar-critics, they reveal in effect, in the guise of criticism, some of Eliot's obsessional problems. In retrospect they are seen to be every bit as much the co-lateral documentation of the subjective origins of his early poetry, and of his plays, which are all about guilt, as a model piece of criticism on his own principles of analysis and comparison, cool, rational, marvellously poised. His obsession with the subject area, as well as his formal analysis, give these essays, as a group, their committedness, their intensity, their force, their even hallucinatory perspicuity.

In this criticism he was keen not solely to describe the virtues of particular authors, nor to find one or two models to serve his own plans best. He moved steadily towards defining some general principles of poetics. To discover the nerve of dramatic poetry became his persistent aim; this is nearer to aesthetics than criticism. He avoided using technical aesthetics, but constantly expressed aesthetic principles in the language of criticism. His most famous dictum about the objective correlative is of this kind. Most critics stop short of his point of generalized formulation, whilst most philosophers start on the other side, in abstract analysis, of its complex and dense simplicity. He works with great adroitness and concision within a critical idiom, but always on the edge of aesthetics. (p. 99)

Eliot's position as critic of drama is strange because he chose to write most on a difficult and remote group of dramatists who raise many special, historical questions. What he did is a little bizarre; for urgent contemporary reasons (his desire to have a poetic drama) he went, in order to establish his criteria about poetry and conventions, realism and prose, to a period drama which gave him an extremely oblique view of his real problem, the one that put him in confrontation with his present-day. For most people this means that a series of significant modern dramatists have been pushed into a critical limbo of Eliot's making. It means that he refused, at least as public critic, to face up to a powerful presence in the twentieth century, namely a varied and interesting prose drama that has displaced verse drama, as prose fiction had displaced epic and narrative poetry. This is, of course, easier to see now because we have before us the longer development; we see continuities stretching from Strindberg, late Ibsen, and the social drama of the nineties and after, through both German expressionism and the poetic revivals in France and England, down to a post-war drama completely liberated from the social realism that persisted still in Eliot's earlier years and had become trite and superficial.

In relation to most of this drama Eliot was critically aloof. This meant, however, that he was unable, and unwilling, to apply an enlightening, positive criticism to a large body of reputable work, and displayed his powers in that respect only on the remoter drama. Naturally no one could require him to write about the prose authors if he didn't wish; he was averse anyway to writing criticism about living writers. Nevertheless, with his drama criticism, he was jumping into contemporary waters with arguments and attacks, and so it is inevitable that one should feel a gap of sorts. What we notice, no doubt with hindsight, in the straightening perspective of history—and all this is now historical—is that his vigorous focusing on the twin problem of the nature of poetic drama, and the practical problem of creating it anew, deprived him really of the distanced view that would have let him see more clearly all the forces, literary and social, that had in fact created the situation, and went on reinforcing the trends that were against his dream, insofar as it was the aspiration actually to bring into being a movement of some proportions. Slipping into this position was unfortunate, because, although drama enlarged his own creative effort,… his intended regenerative criticism was concerned only with a restricted area of the genre and he perhaps underestimated, or did not wish to acknowledge, the major change of direction that was occurring.

As we read his essays on drama in sequence, watching the pattern of criteria developing, we notice that they are wholly tied to the Greek, Renaissance, and French classical tradition. His attempt at a renewal was lucidly calculating and bold but was perhaps a last-ditch stand. The last florescence of the great tradition was the German classical-romantic effort reaching from Goethe to Grillparzer and Hebbel; a movement with which, however, Eliot had little sympathy. It was, moreover, still within earshot of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Eliot's time the gap had indeed widened. (pp. 108-09)

Nor did Eliot, nor anyone else, for that matter, amongst the literary, foresee to what an extent the dominant temper would be so unutterably 'conversationalised', in the sense that all elevation of feeling and attitude would be under suspicion. The poetic drama in the Classical and Renaissance tradition did depend not only on a taste for a type of poetry but also on the receptivity for elevated attitudes, that is, genuine ones, not assumed, or rhetorical in a bad sense. Such receptivity has disappeared in the extreme egalitarian temper of the present.

However, Eliot worked out in his drama criticism some valuable central principles of the poetic form he most admired. He produced what is on any count an illuminating set of ideas about permanent features of this form. The two-dimensional interest of the general principle of poetics and the project for an experiment is constantly maintained. It is a distinctive feature. Other dramatists wrote criticism, but as often as not it was a form of justification of their own practice and deviations, under the guise of general principle. In Eliot the principles are not apologia, defensive pleading, but forward projections. (p. 110)