Reviews for Selected Essays

The average rating for Selected Essays based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-09-22 00:00:00 Daniel Bernal I love Eliot's poetry, especially Four Quartets, but I find that his criticism is just as present day to day for me. These essays offer an education. Without his finely appreciative advocacy it might have been years before I picked up Webster, Tourneur and Jonson. These essays are also great specimens of the English review-essay; as with James, Eliot's conquest of literary London was partly due to his mastery of the lofty, authoritative "we" of canonic critcism.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-07-06 00:00:00 Raymond Mcmanness The man's critical faculties were machete sharp and scalpel precise. Every essay in here reads like the work of somebody with a desk full of papers who throws them all on the floor in one motion and starts from scratch. The craftsmanship and attack strategy is consistently illuminating. Reading his critical work is like watching fog dissipate. A big chunk of this falls into hyper-specialized poetry and theater criticism that I have little use for, and religious writing that is specialized and speaks to a social climate about which I know very little, but the whole thing deserves to be scanned for structural insight. His observations about the role of critics and the problems of being a journalist would hold up anyplace.