The sacred wood

The Sacred Wood is a book of essays on poetry and criticism, first issued in 1920, though this edition is dated 1934. Eliot discusses the nature of poetry, the debt of a writer to the literary past, and the work of poets and dramatists such as Dante, Jonson, Massinger and Blake. The essay on tradition and the individual talent is especially well known. Its argument is that good poetry is shaped by craft and a deep sense of literary history, not by personal feeling alone. It strongly influenced modern criticism.