Now that some thirty years of controversy have passed, it is possible to consider the early critical work of T. S. Eliot in fair perspective and to attempt an assessment both of its values and of its limitations. Though the uncollected essays and the later collected essays have their importance, the major influence stems from the handful of essays published in 1920 as The Sacred Wood and the three critiques collected in 1924 under the title Homage to John Dryden. These two small volumes brought much that was new to English criticism and contained all of Eliot's significant contributions to critical theory. By the early thirties they had been widely read, studied, and quoted. In view of the subsequent fame of this early criticism, its limitations may appear surprising. And, in view of its limitations, its influence has been extraordinary.

When The Sacred Wood appeared in 1920, neohumanism was well under way…. Those who felt that Professor Babbitt and his confreres were applying nonliterary standards presently discovered with satisfaction Eliot's essays on "The Perfect Critic" and "Imperfect Critics." Here was a brilliant young poet of the new poetic era saying with vigorous emphasis that the critic ought to be interested primarily in art, not in morals. Nor was this the only way in which his work was refreshing. His practical criticism made use of a stimulating new approach.

For Eliot in his early days had one main preoccupation, the analysis of "tone." In some cases he meant by "tone" the special effects produced by versification and the handling of sound. More often he meant feeling-tone…. This is a much more specialized approach than has been usual with important critics and was probably inspired by Eliot's favorite critic, Remy de Gourmont, who made much use of the term sensibilité. Eliot was able to make this sort of analysis superbly well and to show a whole generation what illumination could come from a study of tone and mode of sensibility.

In all his critiques Eliot's interest in tone and sensibility was accompanied by an interest in technique which was convincingly an interest in the work of art for its own sake. And many of the analyses were buttressed by a skilful use of illustrative quotations which somehow seemed to bring the whole text before the eyes of the reader.

To be sure, this new approach to criticism was extremely narrow in scope…. [To] Eliot the author's intention was of no concern; it seemed not to enter the range of his vision at all. Nor in his early work did he ordinarily discuss theme, idea, central situation. In all this he was more narrow than that other very recent ancestor of contemporary criticism, I. A. Richards. Richards taught that in considering a poem one must consider four kinds of meaning: the "plain sense"; the emotion expressed; the tone, that is, the author's attitude toward the listener; and the author's intention or purpose. While Eliot used the word "tone" in a less specialized way, he ignored almost completely the plain sense, the emotion, and the author's intention. In short, valuable as Eliot's critical approach may be, if the modern world had no other it would be poor indeed. But the lively critical minds of the present day have learned from many, and one valuable addition to their array of interests is an interest in tone. It is true also that there is a tendency among some critics to disregard such aspects of a literary work as its plain sense and its author's intention; and for this Eliot must bear a share of the responsibility.

Eliot's handful of critiques has been widely influential in another way: in setting up a new standard of judgment for poetry. While making on the one hand a declaration of faith in the "tradition," he delivered, as even the common reader knows, a series of blows at all English poetry since John Donne. According to Eliot, English poetry reached its peak in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and has been deteriorating ever since. There are two aspects of this theory which are important here: the reasons which Eliot assigns for the change and the revision of the poetic hierarchy which resulted from his evaluations.

Elizabethan and Jacobean poets were superior to later poets, Eliot believes, because of their refined and complicated mode of sensibility. They thought through the senses, and they felt their thought. Later poets did not have that gift; their sensibility was more crude. For a "dissociation of sensibility" had set in at the time of Milton and Dryden and continued progressively through the next two centuries. Those contemporary critics who have adopted Eliot's striking phrase use "dissociation of sensibility" in a figurative rather than a literal sense, but Eliot apparently meant it literally. (pp. 269-71)

The most important aspect of Eliot's revision of literary history is in fact just here: the aesthetic standard implied by his conception of the true poetic sensibility. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets are superior, his arguments runs, because they appeal simultaneously to thought, feeling, and the senses. (p. 271)

Another aspect of Eliot's theory of literary history is the constricting effect of his verdict as to particular poets and particular periods. Though he has widened the taste of our generation considerably in one direction, he has narrowed it greatly in another. By putting the Metaphysical poets on a par with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and by setting forth their virtues so strikingly, he has played a considerable part in raising them to their present major status; and by brilliantly describing the wit of Andrew Marvell he has contributed to the current apotheosis of wit. But his early condemnation, later qualified, of all English poetry since John Donne has been, we may feel, immensely harmful. The disparagement of Milton started a wave of controversy which has not yet subsided, even after Eliot's "recantation," and, one may think, has caused Milton's reputation to suffer undeservedly. The Victorians, too, have suffered to an unfortunate degree from the effects of Eliot's sharp scorn. In various essays he dragged in illustrations gratuitously, choosing some of Tennyson's poorest lines, for instance, and holding them up quite irrelevantly for comparison with the Metaphysical best. But it is perhaps the Romantics who have been left in the most parlous state by the awful accusation of the decay of sensibility. For they received this attack at a time when the New Humanists had already assailed the ethical basis of their work. (pp. 272-73)

Besides these large and sweeping effects on taste and judgment, Eliot's critical theorizing has had a more specific influence in giving currency to certain aesthetic doctrines. In particular, his use of the phrase "objective correlative" has added a new term to our critical vocabulary. Eliot's own explanation of the phrase is rather difficult to follow. In the essay on Hamlet he gives us a definition:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

In other words, a particular emotion—the artist's or perhaps the dramatic character's—is to be expressed by a set of objective symbols which will evoke the same emotion in the reader…. The implication would seem to be that the author wishes to arouse in the reader the exact emotion felt by the character—which is seldom, strictly speaking, the case. (p. 273)

[Take, for instance, the case of Hamlet where the hero's extreme wretchedness arises] from the fact that there is no objective equivalence between his emotion and its cause and that there can therefore be no objective equivalence between his emotion and its expression. Hamlet's creator is said to be in the same unhappy situation. He has been gripped by some feeling which he could not understand, some "intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object." Any attempt to express such an emotion is doomed to fail; hence the play Hamlet is inevitably an artistic failure. It is not—such is the implication—the "objective correlative" to Shakespeare's obscure emotion.

Thus in one paragraph the "objective correlative" has been equated by implication with the reader's emotion, the character's emotion, the artist's emotion. As a matter of fact, these three emotions could never possibly be the same. And yet the term "objective correlative" has proved useful, for it constitutes a convenient shorthand by which to say that the artist must find the exact word, phrase, image, rhythm, situation, through which to express whatever emotion he wishes to express and to arouse whatever emotion he wishes to arouse.

Another aesthetic concept brought to our attention by Eliot is the interdependence of style and sensibility. This sounds like a romantic emphasis on art as an expression of the author's personality, but it is not so. Eliot speaks seldom of the sensibility of an individual; rather of the sensibility of an age or of a given school of poets. As the sensibility alters, so the versification, the language, alter; as the versification, the language, expand their resources, the sensibility expands in like measure…. This concept would seem to be a subtle and stimulating combination of two familiar ideas: "The style is the man" and "Form and content are one."

Another doctrine of which we often hear today bears Eliot's stamp, that of the impersonal nature of art. Here again it is hard to know exactly what Eliot meant by "this Impersonal theory," as he calls it. Is he merely putting emphasis on a universally accepted bit of aesthetic doctrine that the poet should not give us his experience raw, a mere cry from the heart, but should transmute it into a work of artistry? Or does he mean something much more stringent? From his phrasing, it would seem the latter. The theory is expounded in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," one of his earliest essays and perhaps his least logical. "The more perfect the artist," he says, "the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." He pictures the artist as surrendering himself to the past, to the tradition…. (pp. 273-74)

How valuable may we consider Eliot's contribution to our critical thinking? Valuable, certainly. He has stimulated many critical minds and contributed markedly to the intellectual ferment of our generation. He introduced a new and illuminating emphasis on tone and sensibility. He gave us a number of brilliant insights into the work of individual authors and periods. But when more time has passed and the backward look searches more keenly, it may be seen also that his early criticism is surprisingly narrow in scope and that a good deal of his critical theorizing is confused or ambiguous. Particularly it may be seen that he has done a disservice to artistic taste by teaching the impressionable and even the less impressionable to look patronizingly on much of their literary heritage and that he has contributed most markedly to a narrowing of poetic standards by holding up all poetry to an exclusive measure of excellence. In some ways, then, his has been a fertilizing influence. In other and very important ways, he has limited and constricted the critical thinking of our time. (p. 275)