[However] admirable as finely tempered, self-possessed criticism [Eliot's] Elizabethan essays may appear to scholar-critics, they reveal in effect, in the guise of criticism, some of Eliot's obsessional problems. In retrospect they are seen to be every bit as much the co-lateral documentation of the subjective origins of his early poetry, and of his plays, which are all about guilt, as a model piece of criticism on his own principles of analysis and comparison, cool, rational, marvellously poised. His obsession with the subject area, as well as his formal analysis, give these essays, as a group, their committedness, their intensity, their force, their even hallucinatory perspicuity.

In this criticism he was keen not solely to describe the virtues of particular authors, nor to find one or two models to serve his own plans best. He moved steadily towards defining some general principles of poetics. To discover the nerve of...