The Critic

Thomas Stearns Eliot was undeniably the most influential critic of his generation. A number of his striking phrases – ‘objective correlative’, ‘dissociation of sensibility’, for example – have passed into the general currency of criticism. Eliot is the standard starting point for most modern discussions of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. But most important of all, he is the last major figure in the line of poet-critics for whom poetry and criticism offer complementary paths to understanding what matters in culture.