T. S. Eliot : A Critic

Thomas Stearns Eliot was equally influential as a critic and poet. He combined literary and social criticism. Eliot has suggested that the work of art is to be regarded as an organism, alive with the life of its own. This idea has brought down upon Eliot the charge that he had reduced the poet to an automaton and that he had thus committed himself to the most romantic theories possible. For Eliot, as for Pound, the essence of poetry is metaphor; but the special insights that he brings to metaphor come, not from Chinese picture writing, but from the French symbolist poets of the 19th century and from the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century. The Victorian attitude towards life may be described gradually as one of acceptance of authority. There’s not to reason what was as true of the Victorian society as of the Victorian soldier. But there were dissentient voices right from the start -- Darwin’s being one of the earliest -- which lent forces to the revolt of the1890s and this was called for that reason, ‘the naughty 90s’. During this last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign, some of the most cherished ideas of the age, including those in literature and criticism, were openly questioned. ‘Interrogate’, it said, ‘before you accept.’ Shaw was one of the earliest writers of the new century to make it an article of his faith. ‘Question! Examine! Test!’ These were the watchwords of his creed. Thence, interrogation became the general habit of the age.