#000057
Selected Essays
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays gathers the criticism that, alongside his poetry, reshaped how the twentieth century read literature. First published in 1932, it collects work from roughly 1917 onward, including the landmark “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The Function of Criticism,” and “The Metaphysical Poets,” together with essays on Dante, Marlowe, Marvell, Dryden, Blake, Baudelaire, and Hamlet. Eliot argues for tradition as a living order that each new work rearranges, for the poet's “impersonality,” and for a criticism grounded in the concrete texture of poems—ideas that underwrote the New Criticism and dominated English studies for decades. The prose is precise, magisterial, and quietly combative. Not every judgment has worn well, and Eliot's authority has been much contested since, but these essays remain among the most consequential criticism in English. For anyone serious about poetry or the history of taste, they are foundational.
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The author
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was the American-born, British-adopted poet of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, a Nobel laureate, and—through his work as critic, editor, and publisher—one of the shaping forces of literary modernism. His criticism carried the same authority as his verse.
The book
Selected Essays first appeared in 1932 (Faber in Britain, Harcourt, Brace in the United States) and was expanded in later editions. It draws together Eliot's most important critical prose from the preceding fifteen years, mixing theoretical statements with close studies of individual poets and dramatists.
How it has aged
Its influence is hard to overstate: the ideas here helped found the New Criticism and set the terms of academic literary study for a generation. Later critics have challenged Eliot's canon, his politics, and his doctrine of impersonality, so the essays now read as both indispensable and contestable.
For more context
Read alongside Eliot's The Sacred Wood and the New Critical writing of Cleanth Brooks and I. A. Richards that followed his lead.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- T. S. Eliot
- Publisher
- Harcourt, Brace
- Year
- 1932
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Essays
- Location
- Maine