Addressing the Friends of the Irish Academy on the subject of W. B. Yeats in 1939, the year after the Irish poet’s death, T. S. Eliot proclaimed that Yeats “was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.” In making this point, he celebrated Yeats’s work for its expression of the man’s “unique personality.”
This may have sounded strange to Eliot’s audience, who would have known his single most influential critical statement, made two decades before. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot had announced the “impersonal theory of poetry,” which held that poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
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