Selected Essays

37 essays in an expanded edition of the author's major volume of criticism.

What defines the relationship between the poet and the past, and what is the true function of criticism?

• The Impersonal Theory of Poetry: Eliot’s argument that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from personality, separating the artist who creates from the man who suffers.
• The Objective Correlative: His influential concept for expressing emotion in art, famously applied in his critique of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" as an artistic failure.
• Dissociation of Sensibility: The theory of a historical split between thought and feeling in English poetry, introduced in his celebrated essay on the Metaphysical Poets.
• Critical Revaluations: In-depth studies of Dante, Shakespeare, John Dryden, and Ben Jonson that reshaped the literary canon for the twentieth century.