Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by T.S. Eliot, Frank Kermode (Editor, Introduction)

Thirty-one essays-categorized as “essays in generalization,” “appreciations of individual authors,” and “social and religious criticism”- written over a half century. This volume reveals Eliot’s original ideas, cogent conclusions, and skill and grace in language. Edited and with an Introduction by Frank Kermode; Index. Published jointly with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Literature, Nonfiction, Criticism, Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

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

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

… we should all try to be critics, and not leave criticism to the fellows who write reviews in the papers…

Reading this book is a powerful antidote to any overly romantic notions of poets that you may entertain. My archetypal poet, for example, is disheveled in dress, probably unshaven, most likely a poor student, easily excitable, not entirely reasonable, an avowed enemy of tradition—in a word, bohemian in thought and habits. And yet when we open the prose of T.S. Eliot, we find a man who is pedantic, conservative, and conventionally religious. This daring modernist poet writes the prose of a mild-mannered—even slightly stuffy—professor of literature.

And yet, for all that, this book brims over with interest. To use a cliché, Eliot is ‘provocative’—by which I mean that he is willing to argue positions that most people will instinctively disagree with. Sometimes he seems intentionally perverse, such as when he says of Hamlet: “So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” More generally, his ideas of orderliness, of classicism, of ‘Christian’ art, are totally at odds with conventional opinion. We normally assume, for example, that great artists use their work as a kind of intense self-expression, where limits cease to exist and simple ideas of right and wrong do not apply. Eliot, meanwhile, advances an idea of the artist as a kind of bookworm, studiously immersed in tradition, who intentionally subjects his (and it is inevitably a man) personality to the impersonal standards of the ages.

Probably much of this would be intolerably pompous if he did not possess a great deal of intelligence (to use a word he quite liked). His essays are profitable even if you have little sympathy for his point of view, as he brings to them, not only fine taste and wide reading, but the experience of being a poet himself. Certainly he notices things in poetry that you or I are unlikely to find, and has a keener appreciation of the virtues of different poets than even the most high strung adolescent. Indeed, as I read these essays, I often felt that I had no appreciation of poetry at all, so paltry is my experience and so blunt is my taste compared to his. For that reason alone, this book is worth reading. Culture rubs off.

I cannot resist here a bit of long-distance psychoanalysis. It surprised me very much that an American who moved to England at the age of 25 should adopt so stridently his new identity—using English expressions, speaking almost exclusively of English literature, even using British spellings. With his embrace of tradition, hierarchy, and organized religion, it is as if he wanted to become the next Samuel Johnson—in all his curmudgeonly glory. I mention this because I constantly found myself wondering if his conservative inclinations stemmed from his desire to fit into his adopted homeland (he would eventually renounce his American citizenship). I suppose a biographer would be able to enlighten me.

In any case, this is the most excitingly boring, the most daringly orthodox book that I have read all year. I suppose I ought to return to his poetry.

[Davis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eliot's affinities and inclinations are very much in the same arena as mine, even if the common charge of stuffy elitism is not entirely unjustified. I do prefer Lewis as a critic of individual authors, but stuff like "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," "Religion and Literature," "What is a Classic?", and his essays on humanism are all among the greatest expository prose of the century. The textbook statement of literary history that Eliot was a hugely important modernist poet is just so incredibly misleading. If anything, he was possibly the most old-fashioned well-regarded poet of the century, who even in his early agnostic poetry cared about the idea of the Great Tradition more than just about anyone else at the time. Essential reading for 20th century conservative thought.

[Emily O · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've recently taken a personal interest in T.S. Eliot. I studied Prufrock and The Waste Land in one of my classes last semester, and that got me interested in Eliot. Over the summer I read The Four Quartets, which is now one of my all-time favorite literary works and which has taken up much of my study this semester. I'm hoping to read his plays throughout the course of next year. When I went to talk to one of my professors, an Eliot scholar, about Eliot's poems, he gave me a copy of The Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. On a recent plane ride I finally had time to finish this excellent collection of Eliot's prose writings.

I will admit that I was a little worried about reading prose written by a well-known poet, but luckily Eliot's prose writing is as virtuosic as his poetry. His essays are both easily enjoyable and incredibly beautiful, and I found myself noting passages for both their insight and their beauty. This collection is helpfully split up into three types of essay, essays in generalization, appreciations of individual authors, and social and religious criticism, which are categories that Eliot described when looking back on his writing. This makes it easy to read the kind of essay you feel like reading at the moment while skipping things you might not be interested in, and makes the essays flow together nicely.

I found the essays in generalization to be the most interesting, as they dealt with criticism, theory, aesthetics, poetics, and the use of poetry and criticism. His essay on "Verse Libre" was a short but thorough look at the misconceptions surrounding supposedly "free verse" poetry, and what makes poems without a strict meter or rhyme scheme good. Easy to read, and with lovely quotable passages like "Freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation," this essay should be assigned reading for poetry students everywhere. His essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" should likewise be required reading. In this essay, Eliot argues that modern writers can only be evaluated in light of their relation to the past, and that classics are made by how they fit into and change our perception of the course of tradition. Eliot's essays on criticism are equally useful, stressing that critics focus on the facts of the content and structure of a piece rather than writing florid essays about how a work made them feel. "When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts." With a brilliant mind and a way with words, Eliot is an excellent essayist on the subject of literature.

While I loved his essays of generalization, I found the section on individual authors slightly less helpful, though not any less well-written. Because I had not read many of the authors he was writing on, I couldn't really appreciate the essays as well as I would have liked. On the other hand, his essay on a few poets made me eager to add them to my to-read list, and his praise of Joyce made me want to quit being such a chicken and pick up his books already. For those who may be more well-read than I, this section of the essays may be more useful.

While I found this collection as a whole to be very informative and eye-opening, there were a few essays that I did not enjoy, and a few points about which I disagreed with Eliot. His emphasis on Latin being the most universal language to Westerners was a bit weird, and had a little too much classical studies bias for me to really buy into it completely. His essays on religion and culture were, at least to me, disappointing. He talked about Christianity as if it were a threatened minority, when of course Christians are both the majority of the population and of governments. His fears of the secularization of society and the adaptable nature of anything other than Christian morality seemed very close-minded to me, which was surprising to see in a man whose ideas are otherwise so expansive and cutting-edge. Since he was a convert to Anglicanism, I guess I can understand his need to do what he saw as defending Christianity, but I feel that he went too far and came off as close-minded. Luckily for us, his poems, even those that are overtly religious like The Four Quartets, lack that pedantic dogmatism and remain focused on the personal contemplative mysteries of his religion, and are therefore enjoyable by all.

Overall, I would say that Eliot's essays are absolutely incredible. Even when I don't agree with his subject matter or think that his logic follows, the writing is always superb. His insights into literature, especially in the essays at the beginning of this collection, were enlightening and enthralling. If you at all interested in Eliot, who was an influential critic and cultural icon of his day as well as an incredible poet and playwright, I would highly recommend this collection.

Rating: 4 stars
Recommendations: If you're a literature geek like me, these might be the essays for you. I especially recommend the essays of generalization at the beginning of the book.

[Nicole Cushing]

Eliot reminds me JUST A LITTLE of David Brooks. He'll say several reasonable things that lead me to think "Oh, he's not that bad." And then he'll say something completely bonkers that makes my teeth ache. There's one major difference between the two, however: Eliot is far more intelligent than Brooks. Like, about twenty times more intelligent.

These essays (some on literature, some on religion and culture) reveal a twentieth century mind possessed by tenth century longings. The man who revolutionized poetry with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" came to recoil from revolution. In his worst (and earliest) essays, he advocates for the submission of the individual artistic will to the collective cultural heritage. He later comes to a more nuanced position, but the essence is the same. Nonetheless, Eliot's mind is so sharp that he can't help but leave us some brilliant aphorisms on his way to a false conclusion. His mind is utterly different than any other mind I've ever encountered, and for this reason alone I'm glad I read this. There are some minds that simply must be reckoned with. Susan Sontag is one. Eliot is another

[salva · Rating 1 out of 5]

womp womp boring fascist is a boring fascist

[sch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jun 2019. Started with several famous essays: "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "What is a Classic?", and "Hamlet and His Problems." These proved so good that I read Kermode's introduction, which persuaded me to read the whole book.

Finished, and my initial impressions are confirmed and chastened. The essays are consistently stimulating, challenging, entertaining, and self-aware. Despite development, there is a fundamental consistency of opinion across several decades; for instance, the thesis of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) reappears in slightly modified form in “Yeats” (1940) and again in “What is a Classic?” (1944). The notion of “dissociation of sensibility” introduced in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) is affirmed, with significant qualifications, in “Milton (II)” (1947). Quite interestingly, Eliot's opinions are not the sort of thing one expects after reading “The Waste Land.” His dogmatic statements are intriguing if not always convincing, and I suspect they apply best to his own poetry.

Setting aside his creative work, which is very rewarding, Eliot was an intelligent man who managed to invent or express several intriguing theoretical ideas in poetics: e.g., the impersonality (or supra-personality) of good poetry, the unity and dynamism of literature and culture (across both space and time, from Virgil to Joyce), the notion of a “classical” strain in European letters, and the thesis of a fracturing or “dissociation” of intellect and feeling in English-language poetry after the English Civil War. He is an interesting and friendly guide to his favorite authors: Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire. Essays on minor authors consistently reveal unexpected and carefully articulated virtues (e.g., numerous seventeenth-century dramatists, Lancelot Andrewes, Andrew Marvell, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson). He seems to have had several languages: at least Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German. His weaknesses include a lurking arrogance and the occasional obscurity: all too often he quotes a beloved line and moves on, without analysis. This is not a problem when we know the line and context, but Eliot was an extraordinarily well-read man.

My favorite essays in this volume, for their thoroughness, depth of attention, and applicability to my own scholarship, are:
* “Dante” (1929, excerpted)
* “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” (1933, also excerpted)
* “Religion and Literature” (1935)
* “What is a Classic?” (1944)
* “Poetry and Drama” (1951)
* The two essays on Milton (1936, 1947) will reward the reader of C. S. Lewis’s PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST.

P.S. Several typographical/editorial blemishes.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eliot offers and demands rigorous precision. Many of my disagreements arise from his seeing tradition as fragile achievement not inevitable context.

[Gille Liath · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Western civilisation crumbling around our ears, should we be bothering about why modern poetry is so bloody awful? In a penetrating essay, Classics and the Man of Letters, TS Eliot shows that there is an intimate connection between the two: that the crumbling and the awfulness are symptoms of a joint, social, even spiritual, cause. A few years ago I would have scoffed at the idea that the study of classics (ie Latin and Greek) was essential to the continuance of English literature – would have thought it risibly elitist. But as Eliot says, a refined, sophisticated literature, capable of expressing the whole range of human experience, demands deep cultural roots and a common cultural background – not only in the poets themselves, but in a sufficiently large section of the population to act as context and audience. And whether we like it or not, the roots of our culture – of all Western culture – are in classical Rome and Greece.

Eliot’s idea of the educated ‘Man (or, I suppose, Woman) of Letters’ is such that you want to echo Austen: ‘I am not surprised at you knowing only a few accomplished people. I am rather surprised at you knowing any’. Eliot admits that he’s asking a lot, but somehow societies of the past – perhaps at great social cost to others – succeeded in producing an entire class of this sort. Now they are rare to vanishing. I’m not sure I have ever met one, or even heard in the media of a modern example. And if you want to know why literature since the war has been pretty much a write-off, that is a big part of the explanation. And of course this same lack of a deep-rooted common culture is also the cause of many of our other ills.

The essay is an example of how, even when supposedly engaged in social criticism, he in fact tends to revert to analysis of the nature and production of poetry. Eliot seems saturated with the subject, treating it with all the dignity, reverence, and understanding of the importance of technique, that we have since lost (a loss Eliot clearly foresaw). As a poet of such stature himself, Eliot’s strictures carry a lot more weight than they would coming from the average academic. Both the careful, technical quality of his prose and the ideas it contains make you want to try harder yourself to be worthier of the language in any writing you may have to do. Including analyses of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats among others, I would say this book is essential for anyone who really takes poetry seriously – perhaps even more so tha Eliot’s own verse.

[Ned Entrikin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far the best collection of Eliot's critical essays for someone reading his non-fiction (if that's the right terms for an author whose other work is poetry and drama) for the first time. A lot of these same pieces are available in Selected Essays, but this edition also digs into some earlier works not included there and some later, otherwise uncollected publications. For me, the highlights are:

"Tradition and the Individual Talent," which reads like his manifesto in some ways;
the essays championing "The Metaphysical Poets" and "Andrew Marvell;"
"Philip Massinger" and "Thomas Middleton," which are pretty good selections from his series of essays on Elizabethan/Jacobean/Caroline drama;
his long essay, "Dante," which made me want to read the rest of his work;
the pair of "Milton" essays, which made me morbidly curious about Milton;
and lastly "What is a Classic?" about Virgil, being the best of those essays where Eliot creates his own definition of something and then makes it narrower and narrower until, in this case, it only fits one poet in all of European literature.

Eliot is better when writing about older literature, in my opinion--maybe because so much of his vision is about understanding individual authors within the scope of a larger literary tradition--but his appreciations of Yeats and James Joyce are good reflections on writers who were roughly his contemporaries. Reading the criticism gives the reader a direct view into the way Eliot thinks, which only enhances the reading of much of his poetry.

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Eliot's poetry is world-renowned, but his criticism and prose are also second-to-none. I had been familiar previously with "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Ulysses, Order and Myth," but have discovered a wealth of other critical perspectives that speak so much not only to the man and his work, but his cultural milieu.

"The Music of Poetry" is a wonderful, wonderful paper that speaks to what Eliot was up to for his whole career. The obvious application is to 'Four Quartets', but there is a musicality to ALL Eliot's poetry that is less obvious in some parts, more obvious in others. He says that poetry should aspire to common speech, which is to say that it should embody the essence of the times in both cultural substance and poetic substance. From this forms the music of poetry, which Eliot ascribes to the sounds and shapes created by words, as informed by their representation of the times, as well as the actual music the words in context and concert make with each other through their suggestive and historical qualities. A simply brilliant essay that contains a keystone to Eliot's poetic method, among other things.

I wish now to read more that Eliot has to offer in his prose work. The poetry has floored me for years. I want the prose to implore me for many more to come.

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This selection of T.S. Eliot's prose is mostly literary criticism with selections at the end of his longer essays on Notes towards the Definition of Culture and The Idea of a Christian Society.

The essays are mostly of interest for what they say of T.S. Eliot rather than what they say of the writers in question and have been selected, I assume on that basis. After all, who reads (or has even heard of) Philip Massinger these days, but his essay on Massinger includes his famous line "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal". Throughout the prose are also hints about his own creative process and lines from The Waste Lane, Ash Wednesday and the Journey of the Magi crop up every now and then in a different context. His adoration of Dante and Virgil knows no bounds. His distinction between universal poets (the former two) and the more particular genius of writers like Shakespeare may strike the Anglophone reader as a little bit too much.

[Mario · Rating 3 out of 5]

This doesn't really all hang together too well. There's a lot of value, but much of it depends on first reading the other work or author being criticized, or otherwise subscribing to Eliot's often strident Catholicism. I can't really even fault Eliot with any of it, it really comes down to the editor not presenting it well.

[Nourah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This went over my head, a lot of what he was writing about I have yet to read. Therefore I can’t judge his criticism on the subject.

Reminder: come back and read Dante’s chapters after reading his works

[Daryl Zamora · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll have to return to the middle part when I'm old and have read my Milton.

[a]

some goat goat goat essays here, alongside some grumpiness

[Freya Munsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

he must be one of the smartest people who has ever lived

[james green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Work and leisure collided.

[Owen Goldin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the earliest edition of the book, which I take it was superseded by later editions.

Interesting nonetheless. Eliot takes us back to a time when it was commonly agreed that a main function of education was to cultivate good taste, and that a literary critic had a major role to play in that regard. Elitist as hell, but not totally off the track, in light of the flattening between high culture and low culture, and the resulting inability of educated folks to tell the difference, that we see today.

Of course Eliot is Eurocentric, and, more than that, Christian-centric. His antisemitism only shows up once, but you can see where it comes from. One can only imagine his response to the opening up of literary studies to the best of all world traditions.

What he has to say about the challenge of a poet -- to find a mode of versification that suits the speech patterns of the times -- is real interesting. I wonder what he would have said about the decline of poetry as a commonly appreciated literary form, in favor of the song. Likewise interesting is his own development in writing verse plays for the 20th century. He thought that this literary form had a real future -- he seems to have been wrong, again.

The volume has much more of his literary criticism than his social thought -- which is conservative to the extreme. He thought that Europe (no mention of America) had a fundamentally Christian culture, and that Christian culture is fundamentally grounded on the Classics. Very few today would champion the essential role of Greek and Roman literature, in this way, today. But Eliot is surely right that something important is being lost, with Greek and Roman studies being considered just another element of a well-rounded education. In a multicultural world, I am not sure of what that is.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice collection of prose pieces from Eliot. It includes works from various periods. The topics are primarily literary criticism and social commentary. One of the most interesting were the two essays back to back where Eliot just blasts Milton's poetry and then retracts what he says in the next essay. Students of poetry will find a lot of useful information here, including a nice elucidation of dramatic versus lyric poetry.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading TS Eliot from the beginning of his career to near the end is pretty interesting on a number of levels. He's got consummate control of language and impressive ideas from the get-go, but subsequently changes his mind on almost all those ideas after being convinced that they aren't adequate to function as real literary theories. Yet he continues to produce interesting, immaculately written stuff until late in life. Interesting guy, this Possum.

[Alyssa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this for a seminar. Don't read this is you don't want to think about TSE and all of his problematic posturing and elitist hang-ups. Really don't! Just stick with the beauty of Prufrock and The Waste Land. Okay well some of the essays aren't too bad...no actually just go read all of the poetry again and again....and again.

[TR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the best literary criticism I've encountered. Reading Eliot's essays is a very good way to get into classic literature and poetry. I think I prefer Wyndham Lewis slightly more as a critic, though.

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

The criticism is good; Eliot can of course write and reason, he is just wrong about a lot

[David Withun · Rating 4 out of 5]

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