Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism : Studies in the Relationship of Criticism to Poetry in England

Eliot, T. S.

ISBN 10: 0674931505 / ISBN 13: 9780674931503

Published by Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 1986

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism : Studies in the Relationship of Criticism to Poetry in England
• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674931505
• ISBN 13: 9780674931503
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

The elder statesman of literary modernism traces the reciprocal relationship between poet and critic.

No individual did more to shape the trajectory of twentieth-century criticism than T. S. Eliot. A self-described “classicist,” his repudiation of the Romantic era’s emphasis on subjectivity and self-expression in favor of a rigorous analytical focus on literary tradition influenced critics for generations to come.

Yet Eliot was not entirely comfortable with his place in the canon. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the universally anthologized 1919 essay that laid out his views in their most programmatic form, was, in his own estimation, “the most juvenile” of his critical writings. He believed that the 1932–1933 Norton Lectures collected here, in contrast, reflected his mature thought. In place of the sweeping pronouncements of his earlier work, these lectures offer a shrewd and sensitive account of criticism as a product of history. Beginning with the development of the field in the age of John Dryden, when critics turned poetry into the province of an intellectual aristocracy, Eliot explores how a long line of English poet-critics responded to the unique demands of their time. Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Arnold, and Richards each mined the past to offer a fresh answer to the question, “what is poetry?” And Eliot brilliantly shows how the poetic strengths―and shortcomings―of each were intimately connected to their critical work.

Trenchant and authoritative, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism reveals that Eliot himself is no exception to this rule. His deep erudition, his existential doubts, and his yearning for order animate these lectures as much as his best poems.

About the Author

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was a poet, critic, playwright, and publisher. The author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature and was admitted into the Order of Merit. As a director of the publishing house Faber & Faber, he oversaw the publication of some of the most influential English-language poets of the twentieth century, including Ted Hughes and W. H. Auden.