The Sacred Wood

These essays reveal Eliot's mastery of language. While writing on subjects as abstruse as the blank verse of Christopher Marlowe, Eliot maintains supreme eloquence, never stumbling or descending into awkwardness. Moreover, Eliot has managed to keep his subject matter--which at times is quite obscure--very accessible, comprehensible to anyone willing to make the effort to finish any given essay.

What sets apart Eliot's essays, however, is neither their eloquence nor their accessibility. Rather, it is that Eliot exemplifies the form that good literary criticism should take. Today's literary criticism is largely descriptive, doing little more than dissecting works and analyzing them. Eliot's criticism is critical--he takes a prominent, and extremely complex literary work or trend, and renders a cogent, logical verdict on it. Eliot is not afraid to lambast the staples of the Western literary pantheon. He almost convinces the reader that Hamlet is a bad play. This is criticism as it should be.