Eliot's views on personality in poetry seem to have two phases … but offer no serious contradiction. The impersonality of the poet creates a set of poems which add up to a distinct and significant personality: the poems have the personality. The first half of this proposition, the purging of "all the accidents of personal emotion" from the poem, is not much cherished these days….
Few critics are now as eager as Eliot was to separate "art" from "the event," "the mind which creates" from "the man who suffers."
