The object of this study is to investigate T. S. Eliot in regard to that very elusive and omnipresent genre of literary history, the lyric. Eliot is a very good practitioner in lyric poetry and continually comments on the art of the lyric in his critical works. An examination of his finest lyric practice in the light of his theory on the subject will further illuminate the unity of Eliot as poet and critic, and quite possibly shed more light on the Four Quartets, whose core passages are self-contained lyrics of a very high caliber, each one emanating from a time-honored tradition yet each remarkably original. Truly these lyrics embody the double quality Eliot praises in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in 1919: " … we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets...