This essay is concerned not with extracting principles but with establishing the tone of Eliot's criticism…. [It] is necessary to go back to the germinal work, the essays collected in The Sacred Wood (1920), to find in a pure form the relation between what is said in his criticism and the authoritative personal tone; in this relation lies the secret of his compulsive success…. [The] rhetorical element is important in these early essays. The quiet tone, precise but hedged with qualification, is the exact embodiment of the thought and a closer examination of it may lead us to look more closely at the thought…. (pp. 26-7)

In The Sacred Wood the ideas and style are already fully formed and the sense of speaking from an assured position is in the young Eliot quite dauntingly middle-aged…. [The] impression left by The Sacred Wood is that a completely honest and rigorous intellectual survey of the highest order has been carried out as it were off stage, and that what one is getting is not even a full report of the results, but simply the application of a few of the results, devastatingly and accurately, to certain current problems of literary value that have come in Eliot's way. The later essays do not develop this critical approach, and in them the stylistic impact is blurred rather than sharpened; they explain and extend certain features of the approach by moving further in the direction of an explicitly theological and sociological attitude to literature.

All the great English critics have been poets seeking to justify their own practice in poetry (F. R. Leavis is the outstanding exception). Eliot resembles Sidney, Dryden, Johnson and Wordsworth in this respect. To put it like this is perhaps to suggest too much that one activity was secondary to the other, that the criticism was a programme and the poetry a demonstration; better to say that the young Eliot's interest in what might be done in English poetry and how the language might be freshly used was at once so intense and so self-conscious that he was compelled both to write poems himself and to say what he was doing by implication in comment on works that appeared to him strikingly helpful, technically related to his own work, or strikingly illustrative of methods that seemed to him no longer profitable.

No clearly defined principles emerge from these essays: the tone is dry, ironic and cagey, as if full-blown theorizing is for fools…. There are no key phrases like Wordsworth's 'the real language of men', no wooing slogans like Arnold's 'the best that is known and thought in the world'. The manner is dry and reticent, and yet it is exciting because of a reserve of intellectual passion all the more impressive for being held back. And we feel that what is being held back is not so much a body of undeclared principles as a bitterly acquired knowledge of the business of living, passion as well as intellect. (pp. 27-9)

The impression gained from the tone predominates because in his handling of ideas Eliot is habitually cautious and evasive. In this he is the successor of Matthew Arnold, however temperamentally opposed the two may be. He describes Arnold as more a propagandist for criticism than a critic; to both the critical intelligence is not merely worthwhile but indispensable. They share a common aim: the defence of the rigorous intellectual analysis of artistic works in an England which is felt to be potentially hostile to such an approach…. As Arnold had done, Eliot too in his later work moved towards a broader interest in the problems of culture and society. (p. 29)

The characteristic insinuating tone [of Eliot's criticism] can be seen in the careful dropping of certain names on the margin of the main arguments of the essays. The disparaging references to Milton have become notorious…. The favourable references to Stendhal and the extremely hostile ones to Meredith might also be mentioned…. (p. 30)

Faults and virtues are hinted at, but no full case, or even the suggestion of a critical case is made out; yet the allusions occur in the course of carefully reasoned arguments and therefore draw to themselves from the main argument some of its force and weight of judgement…. [Eliot] carried out a series of small-scale intellectual reassessments of particular writers so well that readers could fill in the gaps between these new landmarks for themselves, as one joins up the dots in a child's drawing book, so that a whole new orientation of English literary tradition began to appear. (pp. 30-1)

Eliot's criticism is directed against three sacred, no longer argued presuppositions of late nineteenth-century poetic mythology: first, the idea that only the genius, the great man, matters, and that he is solitary, owing nothing to the community of his fellows (Eliot calls this 'the perpetual heresy of English culture')…. He argues that we need second-order minds which are not the same as second-rate minds; the great man may be greater for a current of fresh ideas which only the second-order minds can maintain, and the poet who is less than great will certainly profit from that current. Here again the revolution has been accomplished, not of course entirely on account of Eliot's writings, but owing to impersonal pressures in our society and the advent of mass education. (p. 31)

The second assumption, which is clearly linked with the first, is that the quality of a work of art is dependent on an unanalysable personal emotion which lies beyond intellectual discourse and which the beholder or audience shares with the artist. The third assumption, which may seem superficially to be at odds with the second, is that poetry offers some form of uplift, consolation or philosophy or beautiful thoughts. A closer inspection will show us that the last two ideas really complement each other. If the poem as poem cannot be analysed, the ideas and moral attitudes that are taken up into it are at least detachable and give the critic something to talk about.

Eliot's criticism of all these presuppositions is that they draw the reader's attention away from the poetry itself to something else, the pleasant emotions generated in him by the poem, the interest of the personality he feels is being revealed to him, or some kind of ennobling statement about life…. All views are false which try to substitute something else for the poem. It is noticeable now that in arguing for the substantiality and indivisibility of poetry as a thing in itself Eliot is returning to the chief Romantic doctrine of poetic uniqueness in order to dismiss late aberrations of that doctrine. Thus on what I have crudely summarized as the second assumption to which he is hostile, his attitude is ambiguous: he holds with Coleridge and the Symbolists that the poem is an imaginative fusion reaching an effect that lies beyond personal associations and beyond the local or historical (lexical) meanings of words and phrases…. (pp. 31-2)

In the first essays of The Sacred Wood Eliot describes 'The Perfect Critic' and then various contemporary 'Imperfect Critics'. All the latter are interested in something other than the poem as unique and independent object….

The key words used in the passage characterizing the perfect critic are 'intelligence', 'feeling' and 'feelings', 'emotion', and 'sensibility' (the latter less frequently). Combinations of these terms occur throughout the essays; they suggest that Eliot's hidden theory of poetry is based on a theory of human perception. In real life from moment to moment feeling (sensuous perception) and thought (reflection on it) come together in the continuous stream of consciousness, so that the poet looking faithfully at his experience can never separate thought and feeling (together they form his sensibility); abstract thought comes later, after both the original experience and the fused thought resulting from it; so does emotion, for in Eliot's usage emotion is something that plays later about experience, not a part of it like the immediate feelings—it is both a luxury product and a stage on the road towards increasing indefiniteness. (p. 33)

The classical severity of all this, the austere intellectual tone, is aimed at getting the critic away from emotions and personalities and abstract systems to the hard facts of real moments of perception. There is a paradox here: Eliot's intellectualism, his approval of the hard definite outline …, his distrust of the blurred emotion mediating between creation and the expression of personality …, is directed to a conception of literature which is not intellectualistic, but which envisages a 'whole man' in whom thought, feeling and even muscular sensation may be blended, and in him also the final success of creation is not entirely under the control of the will: the good poet who has struggled for years to refine his technique may yet be surprised at what he finds himself saying. (pp. 33-4)

The fullest statement of Eliot's view of the impersonal artist is found in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' which comes nearer than any of the other essays to a consistent formulation of ideas…. The passages on the fusion of thought and feeling declare that only such 'felt thought' can do justice to the truth of individual moments of experience; in a similar manner, the historical sense which, though it is said to involve great labour, is clearly not the same as historical learning, can achieve a knowledge of the timeless through the understanding of particular historical moments.

Eliot's conception of tradition raises more difficulties than any other aspect of his view of literature. It is possible to see how it chimes in with his other ideas; it is especially helpful as a ballast for his view of the poet. If the poet is likely to be hamstrung by doctrinaire intentions, if even his attainment of greatness is a matter of hit and miss in particular historical circumstances, then it is necessary for the creator who must be so aware of imperfection to have an external standard: the impersonal artist takes his place in an impersonal order. It is equally easy to see that Eliot's 'simultaneous order' is not some vast extension of literary history at which literary historians can grind away linking up everything with influences and derivations. This is an aesthetic order. The past is altered by the present. (pp. 35-6)

[It is not clear] whether Eliot thinks the poet must always be in the position of having an increasingly large available past of thought and literature or whether this is a special crisis of the twentieth century. The latter seems more likely, availability in a liberal, internationalized epoch in which cultural communication through both time and space has become highly organized and the 'imaginary museum' extended to all the arts. Eliot does not take much account of how in other periods poets might have been able to work with much less self-consciousness about the past. To be sure, he does show some recognition of this in the essay 'The Possibility of a Poetic Drama' where he discusses the value of a conventional form like the Elizabethan blank verse drama for the writer, especially the minor writer. If there is no tradition, he says here, we lose our hold on the present; if there is no established form, the writer has to waste time and energy in hammering out a home-made form for himself. (pp. 37-8)

As for the objection that his programme demands too much learning for the modern poet and will end by turning him into a pedant, Eliot finally evades a straight answer that would state what he expects the honest minor poet actually to do…. So the nature of the consciousness of the past remains largely undefined, while what is being stressed is its value in taking the poet outside himself and so assisting him to depersonalize his art. Therefore the second section of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' comes round again to discussing the impersonality of the artist. The good poet is not a more interesting personality or a man who has more to say than others; what marks him off is that his mind is a more finely-perfected medium into which all kinds of different feelings are free to enter into new combinations. (pp. 38-9)

Given the impersonality of the poet, there must be a binding agent other than emotion or personal intention to bring about the fusion of the various elements. This is the 'objective correlative'…. [One] is driven to conclude that the concept of the objective correlative originates in order to fill the gap which has been there described between the mind that suffers and the mind that creates, to obviate the impression of a complete stasis, the impersonal artist frozen in the impersonal order of tradition. But if the correlative is a set of objects, a situation or a chain of events, it still remains to be operated in some manner by the conscious mind: the dynamic of the creative process still retreats before the reader, and this is not surprising; not surprising in any attempt at a theory of poetry, but especially not in Eliot, when he starts from the recognition of the equation between a partial, contingent individual contribution and a varying measure of sheer good luck. (pp. 39-40)

The essays on particular poets, Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger in The Sacred Wood, and the subsequent ones in Elizabethan Essays, carry out the programme already discussed. Certain points and curves are plotted along the line of that subterranean, unhistorical tradition which is the true one for the poet. As with Arnold's 'touchstones', the plotting of the graph can be highly personal. The same intelligence and complete control of subject displayed in the poems and in the theoretical essays are applied to substantiating the practice of complexity. Hence the rehabilitation of Donne and the Metaphysicals.

Thus the reviewer's judgements, the hints, the comments on style, form and metre, valid as so many of them still seem and the basis for so much of our thinking about poetry, may be traced to an extremely personal and special epistemology. Great poetry is complex and impersonal, because the isolated moments making up contingent experience are complex structures of feelings in which perceiving subject and objective outer world merge in an impersonal order.

The great achievement of these essays … is to define the individual quality of writers by close attention to the language of their poetry…. The poet creates language and is renewed by it. When Eliot stabilized his own poetic style he became a less exciting critic. The Sacred Wood records the growth of a poet's mind. Language, form and metre have more life than the individual intention. The individual struggle with them can produce both despair and joy. Later in the Quartets Eliot is still meditating on language: the struggle with words will be decided by a complex of cultural forces of which the poet cannot foresee the outcome…. But there is also the occasional happy reward of the poet, when the words come together and make a significant point on the line of tradition. (pp. 41-2)