T. S. ELIOT AS CRITIC AMONG CRITICS

This thesis looks at how T. S. Eliot's critical thinking relates to that of other critics from the time of Arnold to his own generation and addresses itself to recurrent critical problems.;Chapter II begins with Arthur Symons and moves to his master, Walter Pater, critics whom Eliot knew well in his formative years and who helped to detach him from the moralism of Matthew Aronold. Symons introduced him to the French Symbolist tradition.;Chapter III examines two Americans, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Babbitt has strong roots in French literature and criticism and was a moralist. More's roots are in seventeenth-century English literature and religion; like Eliot he moved from "Humanism" to the Anglican Church. All three are seen to be "Classicists" and "Humanists" in varying degrees.;Next, Chapter IV compares Eliot's critical prose with that of three serious but non-academic critics, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, who, like Eliot, are practising writers concerned with vindicating their own kind of writing.;Chapter I focuses on Matthew Arnold. While Aristotle as the founder of the "Academic" tradition, and Dryden and Coleridge as representatives of "classical" and "romantic" criticism are certainly present in Eliot's mind, Arnold is the earliest major critic with whom he argues as if he were a contemporary.;Chapter V discusses John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read. Murry, like Eliot, was for a time the editor of a literary journal with a polemical position, and Read worked in the business of publishing. Thus all three were connected to the current literary scene.;Chapter VI finds resemblances in I. A. Richards's critical approach and Eliot's. Richards's career marks the shift of criticism to the academic world, which accepted and absorbed both the poetry and criticism of Eliot. The context is established for the appearance of the New Criticism and its successors.;The public record of T.S. Eliot the critic considered in this thesis shows that he has significant affinities with a number of influential critics from Arnold's time to his own.