Authority and Personality in Eliot’s Criticism

Abstract

Eliot frequently insisted that his criticism should be seen in relation to his creative writing. He described it as ‘a by-product of my private poetry-workshop; or a prolongation of the thinking that went into the formation of my own verse’,¹ which suggests that his early essays were largely written in order to clear his own mind. But this is a very modest account of his work, offering an engagingly amateur image which masks the element of commitment, even of ruthlessness, that appears in many of the early essays.