Sacred Wood Eliot T. S. (1997)

This seminal book is T. S. Eliots first collection of literary criticism, published in London in 1920, two years before The Waste Land. It contains some of his most influential early essays and reviews, including Tradition and the Individual Talent and Hamlet and His Problems, as well as Eliots thoughts on Marlowe, Jonson and Massinger and his first tribute to Dante. Many of Eliots best-known critical statements appear in these pages. Looking back on his career as a critic in 1961, Eliot wrote that his earlier criticism implicitly defended the kind of poetry he and his friends wrote, giving the essays the urgency and warmth of an advocates appeal. That urgency remains apparent long after the essays first appeared.