Excerpt from Essays in Literary Criticism of George Santayana Tragic Philosophy (1936) he is more tolerant of a poet who spoke to an age that needed no mastering living religion. It is not clear whether the later Santayana finds Shakespeare's secular ism adequate for the needs of great poetry; but as against the crit icism of T. S. Eliot, he defends Shakespeare for having stuck fast in the facts of life and he pits him against Dante in a way that one could hardly have anticipated from the early essay. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.