Selected Essays: 1917–1932

What defines the relationship between the poet and the past, and what is the true function of criticism?

• The Impersonal Theory of Poetry: Eliot’s argument that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from personality, separating the artist who creates from the man who suffers.
• The Objective Correlative: His influential concept for expressing emotion in art, famously applied in his critique of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" as an artistic failure.
• Dissociation of Sensibility: The theory of a historical split between thought and feeling in English poetry, introduced in his celebrated essay on the Metaphysical Poets.
• Critical Revaluations: In-depth studies of Dante, Shakespeare, John Dryden, and Ben Jonson that reshaped the literary canon for the twentieth century.