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How did T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism influence New Criticism?

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T.S. Eliot stands at a chalkboard, writing a diagram with letters and Greek symbols representing characters for a play, in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study. — T.S. Eliot T.S. Eliot working on his play *The Cocktail Party* in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, 1948. The letters of the alphabet in his diagram represent characters in the play. The Greek letters represent characters yet to be invented.

T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism was a foundational influence on the New Criticism movement, providing a framework that shifted focus toward the intrinsic qualities of a text rather than historical or biographical context.1

Eliot’s impact on New Critics—many of whom were also poets—manifested in several key ways:

Close Reading: Eliot’s essays, such as those in The Sacred Wood (1920), drew intense attention to the language of literature, encouraging the rigorous, analytical approach to poetry that became the hallmark of New Criticism.2
Objective Correlative: His theory of the objective correlative—the idea that art must evoke emotion through a specific set of objects or events—helped correct vague, sentimental rhetoric by insisting on a precise correspondence between word and object.3
Redefining Literary History: Along with the New Critics, Eliot helped "rewrite the map of literary history," challenging the dominance of Romantic styles and promoting the study of difficult Modernist writing.2
Formalism: His concepts, such as the "dissociation of sensibility," advanced new ways of discussing literary structure and the union of thought and feeling within a work.3