Eliot collects in this work a group of essays on writers and poets - Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Pascal, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Yeats, Poe and Valéry, Dante, Goethe - and lectures in the United States and England.

In his first chapter, he writes about free verse, rhyme, when its use is excessive it can be harmful.

In the lectures, Eliot discourses on "The Three Senses of Culture," "What Dante Means to Me," "Poetry and Drama," "American Literature and Language," "The Literature of Politics" "Criticizing the Critic," among others. In "The Idea of a Christian Society," a lecture at Cambridge, Eliot discusses the relationship between the "Community of Christians" and the State, which cannot be Christian except in a negative way, since its Christianity is the reflection of the Christianity of the society it governs.