Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier. Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors. Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians. Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins? Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten. Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.
And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading. It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century. His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid. He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.
Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake. We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius. We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante. We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama. In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done. Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats? I shall have to investigate further.
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