Produced by Meredith Bach, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) The Sacred Wood “Intravit pinacothecam senex canus, exercitati vultus et qui videretur nescio quid magnum promittere, sed cultu non proinde speciosus, et facile appareret eum ex hac nota litteratum esse, quos odisse divites solent ... 'ego’ inquit 'poeta sum et ut spero, non humillimi spiritus, si modo coronis aliquid credendum est, quas etiam ad immeritos deferre gratia solet.’”—PETRONIUS. “I also like to dine on becaficas.” The Sacred Wood Essays On Poetry And Criticism By T. S. Eliot Methuen & Co. Ltd. 36 Essex Street W.C. London 1920 For H. W. E. “Tacuit Et Fecit” Certain of these essays appeared, in the same or a more primitive form, in _The Times Literary Supplement_, _The Athenæum_, _Art and Letters_, and _The Egoist_. The author desires to express his obligation to the editors of these periodicals. INTRODUCTION To anyone who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of justice, it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one has vaguely depreciated for some years. The faults and foibles of Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago, after my first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on re-reading some of his prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position. And what makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again. A moderate number of persons have engaged in what is called “critical” writing, but no conclusion is any more solidly established than it was in 1865. In the first essay in the first _Essays in Criticism_ we read that it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact something premature; and that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety.