ABSTRACT
Poetry is always a mixture of thinking and feeling. In T. S. Eliot's work the author shall therefore notice shortly his imaginative shades and colours rather than any explicit philosophy: and this is what we should always first do in interpreting metaphysically a poet's work. His earlier poems are pessimistic. Eliot's poetry has deep meanings. It is metaphysical rather than narrative and nearer to Dante and Shakespeare than Homer or Chaucer. Eliot's work is typical of our generation. Typical of its despair, and of its sense of futility. The memory twists and gleams as a silver thread through Eliot's poetry. During the years following the First World War London's more advanced literary thinking was dominated by John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot, editors of the Adelphi and the Criterion. Eliot's The Sacred Wood and For Lancelot Andrewes had contained essays very different from Murry's.
