T. S. Eliot As Critic: The Man Behind The Masks

implicit paean to the muse, a view which accepts Eliot's critical writings as gospel and his person as the critical saint of our age because he is a great and respected poet. This reaction is embodied in numer ous Time articles and Saturday Review portraits; it is the reaction which makes Eliot a literary dictator. 1 To separate Eliot's value as a critic from his personal poetic authority, one has only to suppose that his criticism was secretly written by someone else, Frank Swin nerton say. It is time that we looked at Eliot's critical writings with out their poetic halo—we will find that they were not written by Swinnerton after all, and that they have merits unconnected with Eliot's poetry. Opposed to the automatic praise of publicists and scholars in search of an important subject, there is a school of Eliot haters. Instead of praising his literary criticism because of his poems, they hate it be cause of his religious and cultural opinions, particularly as found in essays of his middle period2 like Religion and Literature and After