The Sacred Wood

Summary

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism is T. S. Eliot's first book of prose criticism, published in London by Methuen in 1920. Eliot was then a young American poet working in a London bank and writing reviews for periodicals; a note in the book says that several essays first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Athenaeum, Art and Letters and The Egoist. The book gathers an introduction and essays on the nature of criticism, on particular critics, on poetic drama, and on poets from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Blake and Dante. The introduction and The Perfect Critic take Matthew Arnold and Coleridge as reference points and ask what a critic should do. Eliot criticizes impressionistic and merely emotional criticism and argues that the true critic works through close comparison and analysis, with feeling and intelligence joined. A group of shorter pieces, Imperfect Critics, judges Swinburne, George Wyndham, Charles Whibley, Paul More and Irving Babbitt, and Remy de Gourmont. The best-known essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, argues that tradition cannot be inherited but must be obtained by great labour. It requires the historical sense, a perception of the past as present, and it means that no poet has his complete meaning alone. The existing monuments of literature form an ideal order that each new work slightly alters. Eliot then describes the poet's mind as a catalyst, comparing it to a bit of finely filiated platinum, and claims that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion, and that an artist's progress is a continual extinction of personality. Several essays consider poetic drama. Hamlet and His Problems argues that the play, not the prince, is the real problem, judges it an artistic failure, and introduces the objective correlative: a set of objects, situation or chain of events that is the formula of a particular emotion. Essays on Marlowe's blank verse, Ben Jonson and Philip Massinger include the remark that immature poets imitate while mature poets steal. The book ends with short essays on Swinburne as poet, Blake and Dante. The Sacred Wood shaped the critical vocabulary of the twentieth century and influenced the close reading later taught by the New Critics.

Top Lessons

• Tradition is earned

  Eliot argues that tradition cannot be inherited but must be obtained by great labour, through a historical sense that sees the past as present. Classical Christian education rests on a similar conviction: students enter the great conversation by study, not by birth.

• Escape from personality

  Eliot claims that poetry is not the expression of personality but an escape from it, and that the artist's progress is a continual self-sacrifice. Students can compare this with Christian teaching on self-denial and with the Romantic view of poetry as self-expression.

• The objective correlative

  In Hamlet and His Problems Eliot says that emotion in art must be expressed through a set of objects, a situation or a chain of events that is its formula. The idea gives students a test for whether a poem or scene earns the feeling it asks for.

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