The Use of Poetry and Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) - Softcover

Eliot, T. S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674931505 ISBN 13: 9780674931503

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 1986

Synopsis

The 1932-33 Norton Lectures are among the best and most important of Eliot's critical writings. Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot does not simply examine the relation of criticism to poetry, but invites us to "start with the supposition that we do not know what poetry is, or what it does or ought to do, or of what use it is; and try to find out, in examining the relation of poetry to criticism, what the use of both of them is."

Eliot begins with the appearance of poetry criticism in the age of Dryden, when poetry became the province of an intellectual aristocracy rather than part of the mind and popular tradition of a whole people. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their attempt to revolutionize the language of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century, made exaggerated claims for poetry and the poet, culminating in Shelley's assertion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." And, in the doubt and decaying moral definitions of the nineteenth century, Arnold transformed poetry into a surrogate for religion.

By studying poetry and criticism in the context of its time, Eliot suggests that we can learn what is permanent about the nature of poetry, and makes a powerful case for both its autonomy and its pluralism in this century.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.

Review

“The most influential critic of the twentieth century reconsiders the English critical tradition. This book is central to the Modernist remapping of literary history.”―David Perkins

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0674931505
• ISBN 13: 9780674931503
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 160