Eliot once wrote that one of the best ways of increasing one's understanding of Dante, after reading the poems themselves, is to read the authors he read and admired; and this is true also of Eliot, so long as we are able to read his authors with some element of direct interest and response, as well as the interest derived from the study of Eliot himself. And in looking at some of the poets who particularly influenced him we are given invaluable assistance by the criticism which he himself wrote. In many cases this transformed contemporary awareness of these poets (independently of its interest in connection with his own poetry) and it still exerts its influence today, and helps to make a ‘direct interest’ possible for us. Eliot himself put a high valuation on his criticism of individual authors who had influenced his own work, and felt that the best of his literary criticism (‘apart from a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world’) was contained in those essays. He called them the ‘by-product of my private poetry workshop’ and felt that they were part of his own poetic activity. (See ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, On Poetry and Poets, p. 106.)