ESSENCE, HISTORY, AND NARRATIVE: T. S. ELIOT ON THE DEFINITION OF POETRY AND CRITICISM.

The article informs that hitorian T.S. Eliot's was a mind passionately longing for unity but penetratingly perceptive to plurality and difference. His literary theory, no less than his poetry, is greatly motivated by this productive but often very taxing tension. This paper studies a tension between historicist pluralism and essentialism on the nature of poetry and criticism. Recognition of the very different and changing forms of poetry and criticism is balanced against the equally recognized need for some sort of unity or structuring order and focus in these fields.