What are the qualifications of a critic?
Eliot speaks about the qualifications of a critic. The first and the most important qualification of a critic is that he must have a very highly developed sense of fact. The value of a practitioner's criticism lies in the fact that he is dealing with facts that he understands. Therefore, he can help us to understand them.
The sense of fact is something very slow to develop. According to Eliot, there is a large part of criticism which seeks to interpret an author and his work. However, most of this interpretation is no interpretation at all. It is mere fiction. The critic gives his impressions of the work and so it is false and misleading. Eliot says: "It is fairly certain that interpretation is only legitimate when it is not
Interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which would otheمسم According to Eliot, the true critic knows the facts about a work of art and puts them before his readers in a simple and easy manner. Here, by "facts" Eliot means various technical aspects of a work of art.
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