?Thomas Stearns Eliot was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and, "one of the twentieth century's major poets," (American citizenship.[2]) Eliot made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, strongly influencing the school of New Criticism. While somewhat self-deprecating and minimizing of his work-he once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of view of the majority and quality of his critical writings. In his critical essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past."[60] This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a, "simultaneous order," of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem, "The Waste Land," [62]. Also important to New Criticism was the idea-as articulated in Eliot's essay, "Hamlet and His Problems." An, "objective correlative," which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences.[63] This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different-but perhaps corollary-interpretations of a work. More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'."[64] Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with-in