The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) is a collection of essays by T.S. Eliot. Although Eliot is primarily recognized as one of the twentieth century’s leading English poets, he was also a prolific and highly influential literary critic. This collection, which includes essays on Algernon Charles Swinburne, Hamlet, William Blake, and Dante, is central to Eliot’s legacy and vision of art.
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent, ” Eliot sheds light on his vision of the role of poet with respect to tradition. Well-versed in classical poetry, Eliot possessed a dynamic vision of poetic tradition that viewed the working poet as an extension of those who came before. The role of the poet, then, is to innovate while remaining in conversation with poets throughout history, to remain “impersonal” by surrendering oneself to a process involving countless others. In “Hamlet and His Problems, ” Eliot provides a critical reading of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy arguing that both the play and its main character fail to accomplish the playwright’s true intention. Coining the concept of the “objective correlative, ” referring to the expression of emotion through a grouping of things or events, Eliot’s essay is a landmark in literary scholarship central to the formalist movement known as the New Criticism. Concluding with essays on Blake and Dante, important spiritual and formal forebears for Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism is central to T.S. Eliot’s legacy as a leading intellectual and artist of the modern era.
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About the author
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a British poet of American descent. Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent family from Boston, Eliot was raised in a religious and intellectual household. Childhood ailments left Eliot isolated for much of his youth, encouraging his interest in literature. At the age of ten, he entered a preparatory school where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. During this time, he also began writing poetry. From 1906 to 1909, he studied at Harvard University, earning a Master of Arts in English literature and introducing himself to the poetry of the French Symbolists. Over the next several years, he studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at the Harvard Graduate School before attending Oxford on a scholarship to Merton College. Tiring of academic life, however, he abandoned his studies and moved to London, where he met the poet Ezra Pound. With Pound’s encouragement and editing, Eliot published such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and “The Waste Land” (1922), works that earned him a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s leading poets and a major figure in literary Modernism. Living in England with his wife Vivienne—from whom he would separate in 1932—Eliot worked as a prominent publisher for Faber and Faber, working with such poets as W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes. He converted to Anglicanism in 1927, an event that inspired his poem “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and led to the composition of his masterpiece Four Quartets (1943). Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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