11 January 2012

the mind of the mature poet







"[T]he mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of 'personality', not being necessarily more interesting, or having 'more to say', but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations."

t.s. eliot (St. Louis, MO, USA, 1888-London, England, 1965), excerpt from Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), as quoted in Mrs Dalloway and the Feminist Revision of Male Modernism, by Merry M. Pawlowski, published as an introduction to Virgina Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Wordsworth Editions, Hertfordshire, 2003


Further reading:

Tradition and the Individual Talent (Bartleby.com)