Neil Heims is a writer and teacher living in Paris. In this essay, he discusses the problem of how to use a poet's biography in the interpretation of his work.

A recurring problem for anyone who reads poetry and wants to understand it is the problem of determining what information about a poem is useful in the interpretation of the poem and where the information might come from. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, an aesthetic of depersonalization, meaning a belief that the poet should be removed from the poem, dominated theories about how to write poetry. For example, T. S. Eliot not only was one of the century's major English poets, he also set the critical values and standards that would be used to judge poetry and determine the way poetry ought to be interpreted. Writing in 1920, he says in “Tradition and the Individual...