SOURCE: An originally unsigned essay entitled "Thomas Middleton," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 1326, 30 June 1927, pp. 445-46.

Eliot, a celebrated Americanborn English poet, essayist, and critic, stressed in his commentary the importance of tradition, religion, and morality in literature. His emphasis on imagery, symbolism, and meaning helped to establish the theories of New Criticism. Eliot's concept of the "objective correlative" is considered a major contribution to literary analysis. In his Selected Essays (1932), he defines the objective correlative as "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of [a particular emotion" and which has the ability to evoke that emotion in the reader. Here, in a very influential and oftencited survey of Middleton and his works, Eliot extols the playwright as one of the greatest writers of the Elizabethan period. For example, The Changeling, he asserts, "stands above every tragic play of...