Premium
“Our mad poetics to confute”: the Personal Voice in T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry and Criticism
Author(s) -
Schuchard Ronald
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1976.tb00525.x
Subject(s) - poetry , criticism , poetics , sensibility , literature , tone (literature) , philosophy , critical theory , literary criticism , new criticism , art , aesthetics , literary theory , epistemology
This essay seeks to erode traditional attitudes toward Eliot's impersonal theory of art by initiating a study of the personal voice in his early poetry and criticism. Ironically, Eliot's critical prose shows that as he developed a theory of depersonalization in the creative process he defined a method of repersonalization for the critical process. In his own literary criticism Eliot was preoccupied with the interior world of the poet, and he delineated specific theoretical and critical guidelines for unearthing the subjective emotional tone beneath the objective surface of the work. the application of Eliot's principles to his Laforguean poems shows the emergence of Eliot's distinctive, antiromantic voice to be in ironic contrast to the philosophical voice of his Laforguean models. the “religious” and classical sensibility that informs the deceptive surface patterns of these early poems provides a vital interpretive pattern for approaching subsequent poems.