POETRY WORKSHOP

‘He has always been a student, and read extensively in English literature, especially Shakespeare. He has read practically all of Shakespeare, whom he admires, and retains much in memory.’ Thus the testimony of Eliot's parents when recommending him, at the age of seventeen, to the Head Master of Milton Academy. Eliot's poetry and literary criticism, over the course of his subsequent life, amply justify their claim and make it clear that he spent a lifetime continuing to read and admire. Some of his most notable, controversial and historically persistent critical formulations occur during discussions of Shakespeare. Judgements on particular plays and characters have had a similarly lengthy critical history; and historians of the relationship between Shakespeare and literary modernism have judged that whole schools of Shakespearean literary criticism and theory have been instigated by or deeply indebted to Eliot. Richard Halpern, for instance, says that Eliot ‘established the basic protocols for twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism’, protocols variously adapted by such critics as G. Wilson Knight, L. C. Knights, Northrop Frye and Cleanth Brooks. He also thinks that Eliot's brief article ‘The Beating of a Drum’, published in 1923 and not reprinted, originates a primitivist discourse in the disciplinary language of anthropology whose influence on Shakespeare studies may be traced as far as the New Historicism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a critical kind not in other ways notably indebted to Eliot.