Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot, who lived from 1888-1965, is one of the most well-known and indeed most talented and influential poets of the twentieth century. His greatest works include The Waste Land and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. However, he also established a well-deserved reputation for being a leading literary critic.

Eliot was a man of conservative, right-wing views (recently his reputation has been affected by allegations of anti-Semitism in some of his work) and a believer in a variety of traditional values. In his criticism, he focuses on the concept of the objective correlative – by which he means that there should be a congruence between a dramatic character’s state of mind, the language used to refer to it and the reasons causing that state of mind. Famously, he relates this concept to the character of Hamlet and, noting the language used so brilliantly to describe his feverish imagination, concludes that the situation in which Hamlet finds himself is not sufficient to account for this great anguish. Hence, he finds, the play must be accounted a failure. As can be imagined, this has been a controversial conclusion and it has come in for a great deal of debate subsequently. To some extent, Eliot in his later years softened his earlier stance on this and other positions – but then again, many men find it impossible to sustain the rigorous positions they took when younger once they have been more fully infused with the sympathy for human frailties that often comes with age.

In other aspects of his criticism, most notably in the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ Shakespeare is recognised as the genius he is generally taken to be. In this essay, Eliot argues for the importance of placing literary works within not just the context of contemporaneous events but also in the context of previous works written about the same subject matter or in the same tradition. By drawing so frequently upon the works of the past, therefore, Shakespeare shows that he is not only conversant with the lessons of the past but is able to use commonly available material to indicate his own ideas and feelings about the way of the world. This is similar to Sir Isaac Newton’s famous dictum that, by following the properly observed scientific methods of past experiments, we are able to ‘stand on the shoulder of giants.’ Consequently, even with works primarily of romantic imagination, such as the Sonnets, are still rooted in the traditions of the past by the adoption (and indeed adaptation) of the sonnet style and structure.