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Criticism provides the access point between the construct of the imaginative-divine world, poetically conceived, and the experiential fact of the real human world, behaviourally enacted. A critic must, in many significant ways, be no less wise than a poet.
Since this idea of wisdom's necessarily being a part of the critical sensibility is involved, a tentative definition should be given. Wisdom is the possession of insight into the underlying conflict inherent in all meaningful human affairs, into the battle of good against evil—having decided first what is good and what is evil, by which criteria and in which situations—and the knowledge that understanding, by itself, is not enough, that it must be lived in real situations. We must also understand that the drama of this conflict within the human spirit is ‘closet drama’ of the highest order unless exteriorized in terms of decisive behaviour for or against, but always actively within, the human community. No one knew this better than T. S. Eliot.
Such an extraordinarily extensive literature has accumulated concerning the work of Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) that anyone who once again opens Complete poems and plays invites not only automatic academic recognition, but boredom as well. It is an amazing fact of literary history in this century that hundreds of books and thousands of articles and theses have been written on Eliot and his work, yet the latter never seems to relinquish its resiliency, pertinence, and beauty. Some of this might be attributed to the perverse ingenuity and pure persistence of the academic literary community; but one cannot avoid the conjecture that there must be something perseveringly appealing and therefore humanly interesting which is intrinsic to the work in order to account for its ability to withstand such continual foraging.