Langdon Hammer continues his discussion of T.S. Eliot in this Yale lecture from Modern Poetry (ENGL 310), recorded in Spring 2007. He returns to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," examining its psychological, social, and generic dimensions, then turns to Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" to consider his place in literary criticism and his modernist poetics. Hammer traces how Eliot's critique of Romanticism in that essay sets up his idea of literary tradition, then uses it as a bridge into The Waste Land, presenting and analyzing the poem's opening lines. The lecture moves through four chapters, from Eliot's relationship to literary tradition and its 'invention,' through close readings of both major poems, giving a clear sense of how Eliot's criticism and poetry inform each other.