Theory and Personality

T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism is often described as ‘the criticism of a poet’. Mr Lee asks what happens if we take that description seriously and read the criticism as if it was as much the expression of the man, it its way, as the poetry; continuous with the poetry and the preoccupations of the poetry. This essay in interpretation is an attempt to follow out such a programme and to account for the contradictions and seemingly discrepant utterances that Eliot himself left unexplained. The opening chapter offers an outline of Eliot’s main ‘theories’ and the connection between them, and subsequent chapters deal with critical approaches to Eliot; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and impersonality; Eliot’s ideas on personality; and the relation between individual personality and society.