The sacred wood; essays on poetry and criticism: Eliot, T.
Eliot describes The Sacred Wood as a collection of essays written on “the problem of the integrity of poetry.” By this he seems to mean three things. First, that poets and critics should come to their work dispassionately; “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotions, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”.Introduction.--The perfect critic.--Imperfect critics: Swinburne as critic. A romantic aristocrat. The local flavour. A note on the American critic.--The French intelligence.--Tradition and the individual talent.--The possibility of a poetic drama.--Notes on the blank verse.But poetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can deal with this idea when it has reached the point of immediate acceptance, when it has become almost a physical modification. If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious impeachment, not only against Dante, but against most of Dante’s contemporaries. 5.
Internet Archive BookReader The sacred wood. Essays on poetry and criticism Internet Archive BookReader The sacred wood. Essays on poetry and criticism.Three critics have done their best by him: the notes of Coleridge exemplify Coleridge’s fragmentary and fine perceptions; the essay of Leslie Stephen is a piece of formidable destructive analysis; and the essay of Swinburne is Swinburne’s criticism at its best. None of these, probably, has put Massinger finally and irrefutably into a place. 1.
The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects.
