Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
- Poems (1919); Ara Vos Prec (1920); Poems (1920)
- The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920, 1921)
- The Waste Land (1922)
- Homage to John Dryden (1924)
- Poems 1909–1925 (1925)
- For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928, 1929)
- Dante (1929); Animula (1929); Marina (1930)
- Ash-Wednesday (1930)
- Selected Essays 1917–1932 (1932)
- Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
- The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
- After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934)
- The Rock (1934)
- Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
- Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936)
- The Family Reunion (1939)
- The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
- East Coker (1940); Burnt Norton (1941); The Dry Salvages (1941); Little Gidding (1942); Four Quartets (1943)
- Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948, 1949)
- The Cocktail Party (1949, 1950)
- The Confidential Clerk (1954)
- The Elder Statesman (1959)
- Index
Homage to John Dryden (1924)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
- Poems (1919); Ara Vos Prec (1920); Poems (1920)
- The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920, 1921)
- The Waste Land (1922)
- Homage to John Dryden (1924)
- Poems 1909–1925 (1925)
- For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928, 1929)
- Dante (1929); Animula (1929); Marina (1930)
- Ash-Wednesday (1930)
- Selected Essays 1917–1932 (1932)
- Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
- The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
- After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934)
- The Rock (1934)
- Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
- Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936)
- The Family Reunion (1939)
- The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
- East Coker (1940); Burnt Norton (1941); The Dry Salvages (1941); Little Gidding (1942); Four Quartets (1943)
- Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948, 1949)
- The Cocktail Party (1949, 1950)
- The Confidential Clerk (1954)
- The Elder Statesman (1959)
- Index
Summary
Edmund Wilson, Jr.
"T. S. Eliot and the
Seventeenth Century."
New Republic 41
(7 January 1925),
177–78.
This small volume contains three essays on seventeenth-century poetry in Mr. Eliot's best vein. The discussion of English literature has suffered peculiarly from a lack of well-informed and independent criticism outside its official historians, who as a rule accept the same scheme of rankings and hand the same phrases on to one another. It was the great merit of George Moore's imaginary conversations with Edmund Gosse that they attempted to disturb this system. Mr. Moore, reading many celebrated English novels for the first time rather late in life, complained, as a novelist, that the actual artistic qualities of these works did not fit the conventional accounts of them; and Mr. Gosse, who had come to guard the treasures of English culture with almost as little over-exercise of the critical sense as the Beefeater who watches the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, was represented as rather hard put to it to make a satisfactory defense. So Mr. Eliot, who has the advantage over Mr. Moore of having studied his subject as thoroughly as any compiler of text books, becomes bored with the cliché reputations of the English poets: he is tired of hearing about Ben Jonson's “comedy of humors” and the “quaint conceits” of the “metaphysical” poets and the superlative lyric excellence of Wordsworth and Shelley. And he sets out to find what artistic realities are laid away in these parroted phrases.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- T. S. EliotThe Contemporary Reviews, pp. 121 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004