The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism

by T.S. Eliot

This seminal book, Eliot's first collection of literary criticism, appeared in London in 1920, two years before The Waste Land. It contains some of his most influential early essays and reviews, among them 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 'Hamlet and his Problems', and Eliot's thoughts on Marlowe, Jonson and Massinger, as well as his first tribute to Dante. Many of his most famous critical pronouncements come from the pages of The Sacred Wood.

Reviewing his career as a critic in 1961 Eliot wrote that 'in my earlier criticism, both in my general affirmations about poetry and in writing about authors who influenced me, I was implicitly defending the sort of poetry that I and my friends wrote. This gave my essays a kind of urgency, the warmth of appeal of the advocate, which my later, more detached and I hope more judicial essays cannot claim.' This urgency is still apparent more than eighty years after the essays first appeared.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Essays, Nonfiction, Criticism, Writing, Classics

171 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 1920

About the author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection defined the coming-of-age angst of an entire new generation of alienated writers in the twenties and thirties.

Who found their only recourse in Ethical Absolutism.

Unheard of now!

For Eliot at Harvard had been a sheltered orchid...

A late bloomer. Closeted, like me, when a kid, with his books and his unfulfilled longing. A longing soon to be thoroughly intellectually sublimated in his art.

It was a different sorta growing up fast, for his coming-of-age coincided with his mid-life crisis. It was that late in his sequestered life... put it down to the drastic diminishment of the normal pleasures of collegiate life while rooming with his Bostonian maiden aunts.

No frat house Friday night bacchanals for young Tom Eliot - no; but stark Sunday evening “Krisis,” as Karl Barth would call it. You don’t become the Moral Conscience of your era by chasing Gibson Girls.

Likewise, it became an Agenbite of inwit for the young James Joyce. And for Pessoa, it was a game of chess that has seemingly reached terminal stalemate. Or as for Beckett: it was all ill seen, ill said.

In our postmodernist age it is everywhere. The party poopers vs the party animals, no matter what your political allegiances.

For Eliot, it was a youthful Time of Trial... his only option.

The only solution for these masters was in an ineluctable self-constructed logic that so narrows their choices that the self is seen through and conquered.

‘Scent of pine and woodthrush calling through the fog...’

Yes, for the aged Eliot saw clean through the anxious self-persecution that MUST be absolutely terminated on the Cross of our Inner Anguish. He could now breathe easy.

‘Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals,’ in the panoptic view of his mysticism, would henceforth, for the now peaceful Elder Statesman (which Eliot naturally became late in life), be ultimately reduced to a vapour in the triumphal Pure birdsong of a New Morning.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa “ of literature.

I harbor a tone of mixed response about this tome, much as I do towards the literary theory of Ezra Pound. There is much in these essays about the state of criticism, fuelled perhaps by optimism or hubris, the utility of the enterprise is something Eliot appears skeptical towards.

I really enjoyed the attention given to Shakespeare and his contemporaries Marlowe and Jonson. Eliot makes the curious remark that Marlowe's Jew of Malta need be understood as a farce otherwise the conclusion is incomprehensible. I felt like I did when I encountered Richard Rorty saying that Derrida has to be regarded as a comic author. Exhaling slowly I attempted to imagine what Eliot would've thought of Derrida himself.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

I appreciate the innocence in these terms but I imagine they are equipped with a resilience

I am on holiday this week and it will be spent in part on criticism, following Nathan's lead as it is time for such.

[Margaret Langstaff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this first as a know-nothing English major, highlighted the devil out of it, scribbled mad marginalia throughout bristling and with exclamation points (and arrows, astrices) and swallowed in gulps every bit of Eliot hagiography my profs dished up, without reserve, uncritically.

I found my old undergraduate copy a few days ago and was alternately appalled and entertained by my personal reactions recorded there. Also as I re-read it, the actual text of the book itself, those "priceless" essays, Eliot's supposed 24K thoughts and criticisms about literature qua literature, without recourse to my sophmoric comments and elucidations, a really terrible thing happened: It turned to dross before my now much older, far better read eyes--eyes which are also now, today, the red bloodshot eyes of a writer (novelist, poet, critic, reviewer) herself.

This is a nice irony that Eliot himself might have appreciated (he did love his daily dose of irony)because while in school I detested (tho I didn't dare admit it!) his footnote-heavy, obstruse quotes-- in Sanscrit, ancient Greek, Latin, French, Italian, etc. ad nauseum-- poetry--while today I deeply enjoy it, take the books out now and then just to re-read, say, "Ash Wednesday," or the "Hollow Men, or the "Wasteland." Lines such as "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," or "April is the cruelest month," or "not with a bang but whimper" ring in my ears unbidden with the tolling of truth.

But--go figure--his criticism to me today sounds pompous, supercilious, self-consciously erudite, deliberately aimed at impressing the professorial sorts who controlled the lit. mags. that published his poems at the outset. Talk about a weird kind of (perhaps) self-promotion or publicity campaign. Maybe I'm wrong (I often am), but he sounds like an old poop in THE SACRED WOOD and his "famous" essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" just doesn't do a thing for me, quite the opposite. His hyperventilating essay on Blake actually made me laugh; his presumption to understand a poet wholly indifferent to Eliot's own concerns, perhaps even hostile to Eliot's notions of poetry and what makes a poem "great." I might have to eat these words some day, but then words have been my steady diet for a long time, and re-cycling is a good thing, right? So interesting how a mind expands, contracts, eddies and flows, rises and falls in the course of a lifetime of reading. And so rich.

[Lilith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often considered to be a classic of modern English literary mind, but in reality the book is filled with the insecurities of its author. Eliot may be a brilliant poet, but a brilliant critic he is not. It is important to understand the background in which the essays featuring in this collection were written, be intimately familiar with the authors that have been reviewed and criticised by Eliot to be able to see through his very subjective and biased opinion.

Eliot seems to be obsessed with the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne: Swinburne's name shows up on almost every page be he related to the topic in question or not. Swinburne's large legacy which in reality cannot be denied is being denied and deminished by Eliot. It is interesting, though, that Eliot himself displays Swinburnian influences in such works as "The Waste Land."

I am a Swinburnian scholar, so this essay is quite a bit personal for me as I cannot tolerate such unjust treatment of a truly remarkable poet. T.S. Eliot is mostly responsible for Swinburne's descent into obscurity. His essay is not academic and simply appears to be his venture into discrediting many literary giants who were born much before himself, and in particular, Swinburne.

Eliot is especially wrong in that he expects from Victorians and even Elizabethans to comply to the "rules" of modernist literature, seemingly without grasping the very simple fact that all of them were products of their times who responded to the social, political, and historical events relevent to themselves.

[Ellen]

I was a comp. lit concentrator, yet no one forced me to read this book? Something does not add up. P.S. you're all fired.

[Searchingthemeaningoflife Greece · Rating 5 out of 5]

[...]Μόνο ὅταν οἱ ἰδέες ἔρχονται μὲ περισσότερα αυτόματο τρόπο, ὅταν ἔρχονται πιὸ ἐλεύθερα καὶ χειρίζονται λιγότερο, ἀρχίζουμε νὰ ὑποψιαζόμαστε τὴ προέλευσή τους, νὰ ὑποψιαζόμαστε ὅτι ξεπηδοῦν ἀπὸ μιὰ πηγὴ ποὺ δὲν ἔχει βάθος.[...]

[...]Εἶναι ἀνόητο νὰ ποῦμε ὅτι ἡ κριτικὴ γίνεται με σκοπὸ τὴ «δημιουργίας ἢ ὅτι ἡ δημιουργία γίνεται μὲ σκοπὸ τὴ κριτική. Εἶναι ἐπίσης ἀνόητο να δεχτοῦμε ὅτι ὑπάρχουν ἐποχές κριτικῆς κι' ἐποχές δημιουργικότητας, σά νά εἴχαμε και λύτερες ελπίδες νὰ βροῦμε πνευματικό φῶς ἂν βουλιάζαμε μέσα στο διανοητικὸ σκοτάδι.[...]

[...]Αὐτὸ ποὺ συμβαίνει είναι μια διαρκής παράδοση τοῦ ἑαυ τοῦ του ὅπως ἀκριβῶς γίνεται σὲ κάτι πού εἶναι περισσότερο πολύτιμο. Η πρόοδος τοῦ καλλιτέχνη είναι μια συνεχής αὐτοθυσία, μιὰ συνεχής απόσβεση τῆς προσωπικότητας[...]

[James Hold · Rating 1 out of 5]

Available at Gutenberg Canada. Eliot demonstrates his prose is as boring as his poetry.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t read all the essays in this collection. Like all books of literary essays, there is the splitting of differences until nothing is left. Nuances nuance themselves into the ether of thought that is either beyond my mind to understand, or beyond my interest to care. (Swinburne?**) But this volume is largely about poetic drama, which is an interest of mine.

The Possibility of a Poetic Drama is a good, if not somewhat obvious, essay on the nature of poetic drama today. The essay is built around the idea that “… no man can invent a form, create a taste for it, and perfect it, too,” in order to explain the lack of a viable poetic drama today.

I think Eliot was a man of his time, and at that time the serious/literary theatre was dominated by Ibsen’s, Chekhov, and Shaw’s naturalistic drawing-room dramas which, admittedly, do not lend themselves to a poetic telling. (“Poetic” defined as a verse form using rhythmic language.) But he seems to deliberately miss the poetic possibilities of pieces being done by the likes of Strindberg, Maeterlinck and the Symbolists/Expressionist. Perhaps they were not “popular” enough to meet his criteria.

However, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, there has always been a taste for drama focused on the possibilities of language. Poetic drama is not so foreign from the work non-naturalistic plays of Anouilh, Giraudoux, and Brecht, up to Frayn, Stoppard and Kushner today. These are respectably popular playwrights drawing varied audiences.

As for “perfecting” that form, that is a matter of will and time and luck for the artist. The desire of an artist to see it through (i.e., spend a lifetime on it – there have been many dabblers, and the results have been dabbling), to have the time (or opportunity – money/box office) that enables the artist to stay focused on pursuing the form, and possess the luck to have the skill and genius turn it into something magical.

The naturalistic, drawing-room poetic drama is dead. (Thank you, Mr. Eliot, for proving that point.) And while naturalism is still the dominant form, today’s theater is so much more. Dramatic form, one might say, is too open today. But it is not closed to poetic drama if the artist wants to tap that vein.

The other highlight of this set is this famous quote in Eliot’s essays about Philip Massinger. (Yes, Philip Massinger. You know Phil, sure you do.)

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.” (p. 125)

Then Eliot goes on to prove some point about something I didn’t understand. I think it was about this quote, but I’m not sure. Anyway, it is a wonderful quote and probably one of the truest things Eliot wrote in any of these essays. Critics, though, should be reminded that NOT EVERYTHING is stolen. A poet is allowed his “the” and “are” without paying interest or doing jail time.

Good literary criticism should be like having a chat with someone about a subject they are very knowledgeable on – perhaps like a classroom lecture. But otherwise it has no goal. It doesn’t really make one a better reader or writer. (Nor does it make one a writer of poetic drama, as Mr. Eliot has shown.)

If you like literary criticism, this is probably among the best and most entertaining. If not, there’s probably not much for you here.

P.S. It is nice to know Mr. Eliot venerates his wood.

** Having read Swinburne after writing this review, I apologize to him for the snarky comment. Atalanta at Calydon is quite brilliantly done.

[Gille Liath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I was pretty well-read, before I read this: but Eliot refers not only to a lot of poets I’ve never really read (Swinburne, Johnson), but quite a few of whom I’ve never even heard (notably Massinger). And that’s just the English writers – he throws in a sprinkling of Italian and French ones too.

In a way it reflects the thesis of Tradition and the Individual Talent – probably the best-known of the pieces included here: a poet of worth needs to be rooted in the ongoing tradition. And – by implication – even a fully-competent reader of poetry needs to be far more widely-read than is commonly the case today (and perhaps even then). But I’m not convinced it is essential to be conversant with a dozen Elizabethan dramatists rather than just two or three.

Some of the chapters, however, are not about poets at all but critics, people who were no doubt well-known in their day but are not important now. Although these essays include some interesting general reflections on the nature and role of the critic, they go into rather too much detail to demonstrate just where these particular forgotten people went wrong. It’s a bit pointless: you wouldn’t produce a book nit-picking over your football team’s player ratings in the match reports.

But I can’t fault Eliot’s judgement as far as my own reading corresponds to it, which is a rare thing to find; it makes me trust what he says on things outside my experience, and want to find out more about them.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Zipped through this classic - I find it has an odd place in the history of TSE & criticism in general. It's not difficult to see why the later Eliot saw this as rather juvenile & pompous but I also think the acclaim is fair to extents. Obviously some absolute classics in here which need no introduction. At other times- - well who's really that bothered about Swinburne these days?

I do like it but at arms length. Perhaps the best thing is that Eliot follows Coleridge in knowing exactly when an essay has run its length & should end - sooner rather than later. Makes a much lighter read than could be otherwise much appreciated

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This tome is the first and one of the most important assortments of Eliot's critical essays. The title chosen by Eliot for this book is highly suggestive and has its own importance. The term 'sacred wood' refers to that grove which has been pronounced in picturesque details by the famous anthropologist, Sir James Frazer in his book, The Golden Bough.

This grove was situated at Nemi, near Rome, and was sacred to Diana. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree which was vigilantly watched by the King of the Wood, who was both priest and murderer. It was a custom there, as Frazer describes, that "a candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier."

In this way the priest was the murderer also. Eliot emblematically stresses the importance of tradition through the medium this custom which was meticulously preserved through the of centuries by the self-appointed "King" of the Sacred Grove.

Eliot himself becomes the self-styled "King" of tradition and formulates laws and principles how it should be followed by the poets of his own age. He spontaneously passes rulings on the poets and writers of the past, convicting some of the most reputed ones and highly flattering some, the very little known ones.

In this connection George Watson says, "A youthful poet turns critic to justify his own place in the line of succession to stake a claim. He is priest and murderer........ Eliot, the new priest of 'tradition', inherits by a kind of critical massacre, belittling the rights of dead poets to inistorical existences and boldly plundering their claims.”

One of the most imperative ideas which Eliot gives in this collection of essays is that of tradition. He was a classicist in literature and the theme of ‘tradition’ is central both to his criticism and to his creative work.

He was essentially opposed to the Romantic theory which regarded poetry as the expression of the personality of the poet. The Romantic did not attach significance to tradition. Quite the reverse, freedom from all tradition was considered very essential for artistic creation.

Eliot, the high-priest of tradition, stresses its importance for the contemporary writers again and again. He emphasizes the presentness of the past order, and strives to show that the needs of the present age can only be expressed in the perspective of the past tradition.

Not only this, the present also has relevance to the past because the traditional order is modified by the production of a truly great work of literature in the present. Eliot considers tradition as a part of the living culture of the past and working in the order of the present.

This tome shows Eliot's intellectual immaturity as a critic. Some of his characteristic faults are visible here : a) intellectual superciliousness, b) highbrowishness, and c) inflexibility.

Sometimes he shows himself in an episcopal manner and adopts the attitude of a hanging judge. He also shows his habit of oversimplifying and coining new and startling phrases which straightaway catch the attention of the people. But we should bear in mind that it is his earliest collection of critical essays when he was only 32-years of age.

He shows signs of marked improvement in his later critical works which are free from some of these defects. Even then ‘The Sacred Wood’ is a very important critical work of Eliot because some of his groundbreaking ideas are presented in it, which are later on developed and expounded by him in in his successive critical writings.

[Joe1207 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feels encouraging, and edifying, to hear your thoughts on art argued back at you.

"When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts." (pg. 10)

"[Mr. Whibley] has no dissociative faculty. There were very definite vices and definite shortcomings and immaturities in the literature he admires; and as he is not the person to tell us of the vices and shortcomings, he is not the person to lay before us the work of absolutely the finest quality. He exercises neither of the tools of the critic: comparison and analysis. He has not the austerity of passion which can detect unerringly the transition from work of eternal intensity to work that is merely beautiful, and from work that is beautiful to work that is merely charming. For the critic needs to be able not only to saturate himself in the spirit and the fashion of the time--the local flavour--but also to separate himself suddenly from it in appreciation of the highest creative work.
And he needs something else that Mr. Whibley lacks: a creative interest, a focus upon the immediate future. The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems." (37-8)

The entire essay "Tradition and Individual Talent." Seriously, read it. Then reread it. (47-59)

"Some writers appear to believe that emotions gain in intensity through being inarticulate. Perhaps the emotions are not significant enough to endure full daylight." (84)

"We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make...
It is one of the greatest merits of Dante's poem that the vision is so nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as "poetry," is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole.
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valery's "modern poet" who attempts "to produce in us a state." A state, in itself, is nothing whatever.
...The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite--that is not even a test of his success--but to set something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader's particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words... When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties..." (170-1)

[Alejandro Arizmendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read T.S. Eliot is a refreshing experience. Mainly, because he is the type of writer who knows extensively his craft, both as critic and poet. In the case of The Sacred Wood, the reader will find the thoughts of a young critic in his maturity process. The Anxiety that tradition and its influence produce on T.S. Eliot is a clear symptom of it.
However, instead of being a paralyzing experience, the shrewdness and wit of the American writer turn this overwhelming experience into a continuous deep reflection. He is dealing with the common quest anyone who wants to write has to face sooner or later, that is, where to stand against the literary tradition, and more important, how the writer is capable of interacting with the past.
Through his critical writings, T.S. Eliot asserts that the best way to figure out this quandary is to develop an accurate sensibility that allows the writer to have an analytical method to dive into the deepest waters of tradition. When we refer to tradition, we are talking about the ceaseless flux that bounds the past and present poets, which leads to a neverending update of literary value.
The poet-s task, then, is to compare, steal, recreate, and purify what comes to his through an intellectual exercise that gives birth to a work of art. The power and influence of this newly conceived will depend on the tools and strategies that stir a powerful enough emotion to reinstall and reorganize the previous works of art into a new set of evaluation and value.
In this regard, T.S. Eliot not only takes us into his sphere of perception but guides the reader into the real that the poet itself inhabits.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

【The Sacred Wood / TS Eliot / How We Struggled to Bring Theory to Literature】

1910s was an eminent age for the world of letters, if not the world of language itself. It was the era which saw the amalgamation of mathematics with languages on a large scale largely achieved by Bertrand Russell (you can see this name three times in this volume) and AN Whitehead as well as the posthumous publication of Saussure's major works (I'm not too sure if Eliot quickly accepted his views). And we really had to bring this breakthrough to the world of literature as well, which was largely defended by AJ Ayer later.

The first thing which had to do was to build a methodology to see literary figures in history, not by their personality. I think that it is still necessary for us to see them individually on the ground that this methodology is depending on how one sees the word history, but if one is accustomed to see history as am extremely complicated mechanism, they are ready for this view.

It's what is asserted in the most famous essay in this volume, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as well as short critique on various Elizabethan playwrights. However, it would be no longer necessary for us to stick to his methodology in early modern studies, because we already have Steven Greenblatt who expanded the scope of Eliot limited to Elizabethan playwrights to the whole society's archives, by help of Michel Foucault.

[Richard Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone interested in the history of English literature as an academic subject should give this one a look. It makes uneasy reading at times - the shallowness with which Eliot's racism is buried in his brief remarks on Othello is pretty gross. It's also an instance of a critic choosing, for political reasons, not to have a serious understanding of a play. This is a shame because Eliot is, to my mind, the most intelligent of the conservative or reactionary literary theorists I have read, a far far sharper cookie than Matthew Arnold or the Leavises.

His essays on Marlowe, on Blake and on Hamlet I know to present interesting arguments that would demand careful and well-researched contradiction. He makes fascinating points about British and European culture too, in the piece on Dante. And he has succeeded in making me feel that I should check out Swinburne. Which, at this stage, is a real achievement.

[justin, the geezer]

digestible, cogent, and compelling. everyone, at the very least, should read “tradition and individual talent.” in the essay on dante appears one of my favorite t.s. eliot quotes: “the contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.” i wholly disagree with him on hamlet though. need to see the bloom v. eliot boxing match.

[Ezekiel · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mí lo que me queda claro es que a T.S. Eliot le caía mal casi todo el mundo y que se tomó muy en serio que quejarse es deporte nacional. Es como sentarte con tus amigos a rajar en una cafetería pero a este buen señor le han pagado por eso. Quizás T.S. Eliot es más inteligente que yo porque al menos él hizo negocio de despotricar.

[Rod Zinkel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the essays are dated, important for the early 20th century, but addressing works of some authors seldom read today, such as Murray’s translation of Euripides; minor critics Charles Whibley, George Wyndham, and Paul More; and the dramatist Massinger. Even so, there are important ideas to extract from these essays as Eliot sets forth the ideas proper for the critic. The critic was not yet so well established as today, as most critics gave their impressions – their tastes – such as reader’s response reviews give today.

[Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of Eliot's early critical essays. He pronounces many judgments, but the most helpful judgments to this reader a century later are the ones for which he explains his reasoning. Unfortunately in this book those explanations are rare and for the most part lightly sketched.

[Sheppard Braddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some pretty decent essays in here. A few of them are a bit outdated, and there are probably a lot better essays for young writers to read, but there were some good moments. I found his essay on Dante pretty insightful - this was probably the best part I read other than Individual Talent.

[Noor Sargent · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

I think that if I say something about this book I am going to degrade and undo what T. S. Eliot explains so well.

[Kitty Kestrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite enlightening; and his logic holds up all the way through.

[Harry Ramone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Παραδόξως δογματικό κι αυστηρό από κάποιον τόσο πρωτοπόρο. Δείχνει πως ήξερε τους κανόνες, προτού τους σπάσει.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will not write a review on Eliot's review. 😎





...........




I am saving it for my book. 😎

[Joe Murzyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never been a huge fan of poetic criticism, no of TS Eliot outside a few poems. His ability to critique the critiquers, and also praise a few poets himself, is how criticism should be done.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays has been in my library for a long time. I finally read it yesterday. There are numerous sarcastic phrases that authors have made about critics, two are “pigs at a pastry cart” or “eunuchs in a harem,” but most of them amount to “those who can do and those who cannot, critique.” Of course, this little volume on literary criticism was written by Thomas Stearns Eliot. When he dissects a poet’s work, it has the voice of authority.

Of course, there is a certain danger in having those who “can do” provide the criticism. Some critics may have an egoistic “designeritis,” reviewing the subject from the perspective of what they might do. Eliot doesn’t succumb to that in these essays. He grounds them all in the current of the century in which they were written, though he does make comparisons with literature in other tongues and eras. Indeed, the most recurring criticism that Eliot makes is that both poetic drama and certain poetry often lack emotion transformed into artistic form by infinite variation (“…the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; …” (p. 31); “…the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.” (p. 33); “It must take genuine and substantial human emotions, such emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions, and give them artistic form; …” (p. 47); “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; … (p. 58); “The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary scaffold, is complete from the most sensuous to the most intellectual and the most spiritual. Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most elusive:…” (p. 99); and even, “The effect of Morris’s charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the feeling and the vagueness of its object; the effect of Marvell’s upon its bright, hard precision.” (p. 107)). It might surprise one that Eliot even deems it necessary to castigate what might be concerned one of Shakespeare’s finest works (Hamlet) on this basis.

That is another factor in this volume. Eliot isn’t afraid to declare poets considered great or important to be mediocre, or at least lacking. Christopher Marlowe is declared to be “caricature” (p. 54) and the metaphysical poets are reduced to “analytic” (p. 126). Professor Murray’s translations of Greek plays are inadequate: “..it is because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite dead.” (p. 43) He describes Ben Jonson’s Catiline as: “…that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy.” (p. 62)

Perhaps, however, the most important line in the book is so obvious that it needs no repetition. However, I shall quote it because it affirms my experience in terms of any creative endeavor: “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.” (p. 127) Yet, in spite of the all the insights I gleaned from the work, Eliot’s polyglot quotations (using the original Greek, Latin, Italian, and French) made this slow-going for me. Plus, his exhaustive knowledge of earlier literature, part of the secret of his own success, filled me with wonder as to how a former English Literature major could be so ignorant. In final analysis, that may be the most important gift of this volume.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in December 2001.

The poetry of the past was extremely important to T.S. Eliot, and he wrote a fair amount of criticism. This is quite an early collection of essays, mainly about Elizabethan and Jacobean poetic drama. In most of them, the emphasis is on where earlier critics had gone wrong in their assessments of the significance and stature of the poets. While Eliot's writing is (unsurprisingly) insightful, this theme of re-examination and the tone in which it is carried out does make him seem very arrogant. (In the introduction to the second edition, he did say that some of his opinions had changed, without going into details about which, precisely.)

Generally, what Eliot has to say is interesting if rather academic. (Apart from anything else, there are untranslated quotations in at least three different languages.) He is particularly scathing about Gilbert Murray as a populariser of ancient literature - comparing a Greek actor speaking Euripides to an English one in his translation of Medea, he says that at least the original performer had the advantage of lines in his own language. With the concentration of the essays in general on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, it is the essays on Marlowe and Jonson which are the most illuminating.

[H]

"Marlowe's Mephistopheles is a simpler creature than Goethe's. But at least Marlowe has, in a few words, concentrated him into a statement. He is there, and (incidentally) he renders Milton's Satan superfluous. He embodies a philosophy. A creation of art should not do that : he should replace the philosophy. Goethe has not, that is to say, sacrificed to consecrated his thought to make the drama ; the drama is still a means. And this type of mixed art has been repeated by men incomparably smaller than Goethe. ....

"... For Tragedy is is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. ....

"Both philosophies [Shavian and Maeterlinckian, "idea" and "poetic":] are popularizations : the moment an idea has been transferred from its pure state in order that it may become comprehensible to the inferior intelligence it has lost contact with art. It can remain pure only by being stated simply in the form of general truth, or by being transmuted, as the attitude of Flaubert toward the small bourgeois is transformed in Education Sentimentale. It has there become so identified with the reality that you can no longer say what the idea is."

from "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama"

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went to E.J. Pratt Library. I was preparing for my very first university lecture. Not to attend, but to give one. I was caught in nothing less than an aura of magic and absurdity. Who was I to teach the new undergraduates about T.S. Eliot? What did I know? and yet thoughts about life as a professor - the tweed jacket and gentle the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the window as I make subtle and powerful gestures.

I heard my name called from the circulation desk and was taken into a locked room and the book was given to me. I first read Sacred Wood in a locked room in a library because it was the personal edition of Northrop Frye, complete with his marginal notes of his thoughts on the text. I prepared for my first lecture with Frye's sacred wood - greeted by the first work of theory I ever read: "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

This is the way to prepare for a lecture.

[Stacy Nyikos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eliot is widely credited with creating the term, objective correlative, which he uses first in this piece to discuss some of the shortcomings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He defines objective correlative as: “…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” (Eliot para. 7). In working to become more familiar with literary terms and how they are used, I retrieved the article and read through it. Basically, Eliot poses that the emotion Hamlet experiences doesn’t come across in a believable way because it exceeds “the facts as they appear” (Ibid).