SOURCE: "The Silurist," in The Dial, Chicago, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 9, September, 1927, pp. 259-63.
Perhaps the most influential poet and critic to write in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot is closely identified with many of the qualities denoted by the term Modernism: experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. He introduced a number of terms and concepts that strongly affected critical thought in his lifetime, among them the idea that poets must be conscious of the living tradition of literature in order for their work to have artistic and spiritual validity. In general, Eliot upheld values of traditionalism and discipline, and in 1928 he annexed Christian theology to his overall conservative world view. Of his criticism, he stated: "It is a by-product of my private poetry-workshop: or a prolongation of the thinking that went into the formation of my verse." In the following excerpt from a review of Edmund Blunden's On the Poems of Henry Vaughan: Characteristics and Intimations (1927), Eliot comments about various aspects of Vaughan's poetic accomplishment, taking issue throughout with Blunden 's inflated view of it.
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