We might extend such an idea to the earlier work, too, and see a character like J. She points out that although Eliot claimed that drama was less personal than poetry, the cover of drama actually gave Eliot the freedom to expose his private crises. Lyndall Gordon observes a curious paradox regarding Eliot in this regard, in her biography of Eliot, The Imperfect Life of T. Eliot is rather vague about how a poet is to do this – leaving others to ponder it at length. It is the poet’s task to transmute personal feelings into something more universal. We might also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often incorporated part of themselves into their work – he would do it himself, so that, although it would be naive to read The Waste Land as being ‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his first wife, we can nevertheless see aspects of his marriage informing the poem.Īnd in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Eliot would acknowledge that the poet of poets, Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the Bard ‘was occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal’.įor Eliot, great poets turn personal experience into impersonal poetry, but this nevertheless means that their poetry often stems from the personal.

If anything, he is arguing that great poetry is forged in the deeper self, rather than the surface ‘personality’ of the poet. These influences and emotions are worked into great poetry by the self: it is inaccurate to view Eliot’s essay as a critical rejection of ‘self’ altogether. Stead argues in his brilliant The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (Continuum Impacts), Eliot’s talk of escape from personality is not a call to escape from the self but a call to escape further into the self.įor Eliot, the more mature the poet, the more his mind is able to synthesise various influences and emotions to produce something varied and complex. by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also be timeless and universal? Evidently it can, as these poets’ works have outlived the poets who wrote them.)īut is this too simplistic an analysis of Eliot’s argument? His criticism of the idea of poetic personality sounds anti-romantic: a move away from the Romantic idea that, to quote Wordsworth again, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. (Eliot’s argument raises an interesting question: can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. Poetry should be timeless and universal, transcending the circumstances out of which it grew, and transcending the poet’s own generation and lifetime. The Odyssey itself is what matters, not the man (or men – or woman!) who wrote it. Eliot’s example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet who wrote The Odyssey for certain, but we don’t need to.

Poetic notion definition