Tradition and the Individual Talent in T.S. Eliot’s and Wallace Stevens’ Poetry

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of two American poets, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, whose poetry exemplifies the two major opposing trends in American Modernism. My aim is to examine the different ways in which the two poets respond to the solipsism of Romantic poetry. Eliot turns to the historical past of Europe to find a cultural transcendental ego to suppress the individual ego of Romanticism. Against the Romantic solipsism and Eliot’s appeals to tradition, distant and abstract from the contemporary conditions of modern America, Stevens seeks a poetics that focuses on immediate conditions of American experience to forge a literary tradition more fully responsive to the cultural and material impulses of the new world