Eliot, his own devil's advocate.

article: T.S. Eliot on the limits of criticism: the anomalous 'Experiment' of 1929 (Experiment in Criticism, lecture)

author: Ashley Marshall

Marshall discusses one of Eliot's essays, entitled "Experiments in Criticism." She notes how all throughout Eliot's career, he is conflicted with what exactly criticism should entail: how much criticism on the purely literary, and how much on the "extraliterary," which he defines as moral, social, and political content. In "The Frontiers of Criticism," Eliot says the following:

"It is reasonable, I feel, to be on guard against views which claim too much for poetry, as well as to protest against those which claim too little; to recognize a number of uses for poetry, without admitting that poetry must always and everywhere be subservient to any one of them" (11).

" 'there are limits, exceeding which in one direction literary criticism ceases to be literary, and exceeding which in another it ceases to be criticism' ". (6)

However, in "Experiments in Criticism" (1929), Marshall makes the case that Eliot apparently abandons his typical conflicted blend of criticism in which he struggles to separate the two kinds (literary and extraliterary), but realizes in the end that the two kinds are inseparable. One point that Eliot makes in the essay is that the literary relies upon the extraliterary, and that literary without extraliterary is imperfect and insufficient to understand. So that’s an important move on Eliot’s part.

Marshall is therefore very surprised that this essay has been ignored by critics because she sees it as being a defining moment in Eliot’s literary career. As I am not an Eliot scholar, I cannot say whether this is true or not, but Marshall includes another quote of Eliot’s which warns critics against deriving extraliterary questions from literary questions, that “the appreciation of genius and accomplishment should come first” (pp. 210-11) in the analysis. And to me, this is not a deviation from what Marshall had previously described as Eliot’s style of arguing with himself.

Whether or not “Experiments in Criticism” was a turning point for Eliot, I don’t blame him for being conflicted and trying to find a reliance, a connection, between the two types of criticisms. Even in his essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot finds two valid points that could be stretched to battle against each other: the necessary impact of the past on the poet’s work (1093), and also the desensitization (“perverts” is the word he uses) that learning does to a poet’s abilities (1094). If romantics like Emerson and Shelley argued about what in fact poetry IS, Eliot can certainly argue with himself about what we must take from poetry/literature/art.