Essay Questions

How much does T.S. Eliot's prose influence his poetry?

The earlier work of any writer subtly or obviously influences their later work. It is no different with T.S. Eliot. In his prose, for example, Eliot makes the case that the poet must write personally and from the heart and that he or she achieves nothing by setting out to advance scholarly study. As a result, we can read a number of his poems - such as The Waste Land - as personal reactions to events rather than attempts to document historical events through which he lived for posterity.

What is T.S. Eliot's view of literary criticism?

Eliot wrote a lot about literary criticism alongside his writing as a poet. Eliot is in favor of literary criticism, saying that it advances scholarship, as long as certain rules are followed. Eliot makes the case that literary criticism must be tied closely to the text and that texts should be read alongside each other to be appreciated and understood fully. He is particularly excoriating in his judgement of the practice of 'close reading', where readers focus solely on the literary text, ignoring all context and wider information about the text in question.

Discuss T.S. Eliot's interaction with New Criticism.

During the course of his career Eliot was associated with the school of literary criticism known as 'New Criticism'. This school emphasized the aesthetic qualities of a text over its author's biography or the context in which it was written and published. In his essays, Eliot made a number of contributions to 'New Criticism', most notably in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', in which he espouses the view that the structure of a text and its meaning should be considered simultaneously and not in isolation. Although he never declared himself a 'New Critic', Eliot's influence on the movement cannot be denied. Nowadays, close reading is a regular feature of literature degrees at universities.

What is the relationship between T.S. Eliot the poet and T.S. Eliot the critic?

There is a close, intimate relationship between the two aspects of the career of T.S. Eliot - the poet and the critic. His criticism sheds new light on the method and meaning of his poetry and the points he makes in essays are ones he generally sticks to in his later poetry. As both active poet and active critic of other writers, Eliot indubitably expanded his knowledge of the literary in writing so many essays and delivering so many lectures on other writers, including the playwrights Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson. As a consequence, his poetry is more rich, textured and has a greater self-awareness of itself as literature.