Download or read book The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the rise of literary self-consciousness from the Elizabethan period to his own day, Eliot invites us to "start with the supposition that we do not know what poetry is, or what it does or ought to do, or of what use it is; and try to find out, in examining the relation of poetry to criticism, what the use of both of them is."