[Despite critical opinion to the contrary, the prose and poetry of T. S. Eliot] are very closely related. If one reads through the whole of the prose and the whole of the verse, one finds that the same process, the same search for a Tradition and for orthodox principles, combined with the same sensitivity to contemporary life, is developed through both of them. In the essays there are frequent references (they grow more open as time goes on) to problems in which the writer himself is involved in his creative work. (p. 153)

[In] Dante, Baudelaire, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, the Elizabethans, and a half-dozen other influences, one sees the background of Eliot's poetry in Eliot's prose. The poetry and the prose together form a whole: the poetry is strengthened and given its ideals by the prose, the prose is illustrated and given foundation by the poetry. (p. 155)

His prose is not confined to criticism, and perhaps some of the most important parts of his criticism occur in his poetry. For his poetry is literary and full of quotation, and his use of the passages which he quotes implies a critical attitude. We look in the essays for criticism of the Elizabethans which concerns their ideals: in Gerontion and The Waste Land for the criticism which emphasizes their historic actuality.

The pervading weakness of Eliot's writing is a certain fragmentariness…. In his poetry he is an inhibited writer, exploiting in himself a tendency in his own work to break off just when the reader is expecting him to become most lucid, and making of this tendency a technical device. His prose, in spite of its logical precision, its dryness, and its fine organization, is, in its context, uneven: occasionally there are remarks of brilliant observation, of violent prejudice, or whole paragraphs of sententiousness.

The poetry and the prose to some extent bolster each other up, and are interdependent. The thought that has led the poetry on from stage to stage has been developed in the prose. The prose itself, though, has weakness: for Eliot is not very good at argument or at abstract discussion, and it is the poetry that illuminates and justifies his ideas. Without his poetry, the religious and social opinions in his last two critical works would seem ineffective, and perhaps unimportant.

Both poetry and prose combine to produce the impression of an extraordinarily conscientious writer, who is prepared to work out all the ideas which form the background of his poetry, and risk applying this 'ideology' to Church, politics and social life. (pp. 155-56)

Unfortunately, though, his explanations are not quite simple. His conscience seems to have driven him to work out every step in his development, but it has not enabled him to overcome a certain ambiguity….

The very first essay in The Sacred Wood, on "Tradition and The Individual Talent," might lead one to think that Eliot was to live contentedly among the apostles of 'art for art's sake,' brought up to date by Bloomsbury, and called 'significant form.' For he offers a neat formula to illustrate the creation of poetry: 'Consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.'

Michael Roberts has shown that what we are led to suppose happens in this experiment does not really happen at all: T. S. Eliot also darkly hints in a later passage that there is 'at least one doubtful analogy' in this essay: but nevertheless, if one has faith, in the mind's eye such scientific experiments come off. (p. 157)

The essay is in fact a vigorous attack on critics who maintain that poetry is the expression of personality, and at the same time it is a defence of tradition. Although the essay is convincingly argued there is a certain doubt left as to its intention.

Firstly, it is rather difficult to understand why Eliot is so much on the defensive about tradition. For, if he is on the defensive, if his purpose is, like Henry James's, to hold up a Continental example to the English, he over-proves his case. Because he proves that, without tradition as an element in the chemical formula, poetry cannot exist. Therefore tradition is a sine qua non, and it is difficult to see how some poetry can be 'more traditional' than other poetry, except in the sense that it is better or worse, which is, in fact, the sense in which Eliot uses the word traditional. But he does not seem quite happy at letting the reader know he is doing this.

Now, if good poetry is more traditional than bad poetry, the use of the word traditional immediately becomes very dubious, because many of the best poets are obviously not learned. This so worries Eliot that he immediately adopts the tone, on the one hand mystifying, on the other hand almost sneering, which is typical of him in moments when he is least certain of himself. The reader is sneered at for thinking that tradition is something which a really great poet, like Shakespeare, has to acquire: in case he should dispute this, he is then heavily snubbed by a remark to the effect that less great poets have to work hard to gain a sense of the traditional. (p. 158)

[But Eliot is not] making a criticism of the whole of English literature, although he leaves plenty of room for one to think that perhaps he is doing so. What he is really saying is simply that bad poetry is not traditional, and that good poetry is traditional. Further, since he admits that there is no way by which one can examine a poet and discover him to be untraditional, 'untraditional' becomes simply a term of abuse which one reserves for generally accepted poetry which one doesn't happen to like…. It seems rather an elaborate way of bolstering up one's dislikes. (p. 159)

A significant aspect of this essay is the omission of all discussion of the part played by either nature or the objective world in poetry. Eliot's view of æsthetic creation seems to be purely cerebral: the outer world of reality is viewed either as digested experience, or else as 'impressions': impressions that only seem important for what they impress on the mind, without regard for the reality which is doing the impressing. We may well wonder how this formula suits Whitman, or the D. H. Lawrence of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. It certainly does not fit Lawrence's poetry at all, and Whitman only after a straining which renders the meaning of the word 'traditional' very vague. The fact is that Eliot has quite ignored the kind of artist whose creativeness is stimulated by a perpetual tension between the objective world, the world of nature, and his own inner world: and this consciousness of the world outside is the only real impersonality. To Eliot, as to most modern writers, nature, except in the sense of Georgian nature poetry, does not seem to exist. When one notices this, one also begins to understand certain of Eliot's dislikes. (p. 160)

In Eliot's essay there seems to be little feeling that a sense of tradition can be derived from the conditions of life round the poet; that his audience, or his potential audience, is, as it were, the carrier of tradition, and that he is the one infected. Nor is there, as yet, any feeling that tradition may be found in the Church, or, as we find it in Henry James, amongst an aristocracy. It is to be found in books.

In later essays, he endeavours always to trace the line of tradition in literature, and this, of course, leads him eventually away from books, to the contemporary social environment of the writers whom he is discussing, to morals, and, lastly, to theology. A more critical and less analytic attitude to English literature is adopted. (p. 161)

The best and most renowned of Eliot's essays are those on the Elizabethans. It is when we come to the essay on Blake that we notice suddenly the sharp division of his opinion. For whilst we are told that Blake benefited from his lack of systematic education, and that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is 'naked philosophy presented,' we are told later that 'we have the same respect for Blake's philosophy … that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house.' (p. 162)

The remark that Blake's philosophy resembles a piece of home-made furniture is ingenious and unjust, nor does it explain why he was not as great an artist as Beethoven, for instance, whose philosophy was also 'home-made.' As so often happens with Eliot, he seems to diagnose with great acuteness, and then is anxious to suggest some cure: but the cure has no relation to the illness. (p. 163)

The fault with Blake is that he is 'up to twenty, decidedly a traditional.' But after twenty things started to go wrong. Here we encounter the oddest and most personal note in Eliot's criticism. This is a note of almost personal irritation with the writers whom he is criticizing, so strongly does he feel that they oughtn't to be doing something which they do, but something quite different…. One feels that he is never quite satisfied with any English writer, except some of the metaphysical poets, and Pope and Dryden. The others never quite obey all the rules, and, of course, they are never nearly 'traditional' enough.

The search for principles, the perpetual sacrifice of what he calls personality, and the study of tradition, led Eliot to the conclusion that one could make no æsthetic judgment which did not imply a moral judgment: and this same path was one perhaps of many that led him finally to theology.

His conclusions attempt to refute the charge that they are themselves home-made, or that they are individualistic, by being rigidly orthodox, and they attempt also to be practical. That is to say they broaden into a social philosophy, and in his more recent criticism he has applied that philosophy to questions outside literary criticism.

It is these practical conclusions that form the test of his traditionalism: for it is evident that no tradition is wholly valid that is not rooted in contemporary life as much as in the life of the past. (pp. 163-64)

Eliot's own opinions are not merely related to his poetry. They qualify his whole critical attitude, and they make him to some extent a preacher. His aim as a writer has been to be a traditionalist: the tradition which he has adopted, being derived from the Church, has also sociological and educative implications. It is his object to show that the application of these principles in social life is as just as it is correct to apply them to literature. He seems to feel that unless he can prove this, he is, in his work, an individualist: not a traditionalist radically connected with the historic process: but isolated, original, personal, in the sense that he is writing about his own beliefs which are 'home-made,' and so make him eccentric, and different from the people around him. (pp. 164-65)

Eliot looks to the Church, and finds it the single enduring building which survives in the chaos of our civilization…. [Its] teachings and its sacraments survive, and their real emphasis lies not on life but on death: moreover, it does offer the only surviving hope for our civilization…. (p. 165)

[Eliot] will be judged by those who read his prose, and who, perhaps seeking guides, live in the belief that there is only one thing now which is worth doing, and that is to create a new and better civilization. (p. 166)