The Impersonal Theory of Poetry in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by TS Eliot

Abstract

Eliot, an important poet, playwright, and literary critic of the nineteenth century in the United States, was the founder of Western modernism. He pioneered the modern poetic criticism. His practice of modernist poetry is the transition from traditionalist poetics to modernist poetics in the 20th century. His famous poetics theory declaration “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is an immortal classic in the field of poetics theory, in which he proposed the concept of “Traditional,” the theory of “Impersonal” poetry, “Objective Correlative,” and so on. All had a profound influence on the 20th-century poetry creation. This paper aims to analyze and discuss the important “Impersonal” theory from the three aspects of its connotation, the relationship between “Personality” and its intertextuality with New Criticism, so as to further understand Eliot’s poetic concepts.