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His most famous poem, “Dover Beach,” presages the bleak diagnosis of modern sterility in Eliot’s famous early works. By setting a high standard for poetry and demanding that it reflect the “spirit of the age”—indeed viewing it as limited by the zeitgeist of that given age—he undermined the primacy of the individual poet. His objective-historical view fostered the self-consciousness visible in later poets struggling to represent their poetic theories as peculiarly appropriate for their time. In the eighteenth century and before, poetry was written from a consciousness of the poetry of the past, and perforce reflected the time of its writing. After Arnold, a poet’s calculations about the sources of poetry were attempts to define the zeitgeist, surely an extravagant ambition in light of the growing separation between poets and readers.
The objectivism of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics helped provide the substance for the many poetic theories that followed. Eliot’s historical view in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” echoes Arnold’s conception of the poet’s role as defined by the burden of history and the time in which he writes. Few poems could be more calculated in their message and attempt at relevance than “The Waste Land,” for all its greatness; it must be one of the few poems in English that was published with footnotes. The literary theories of W.K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, and John Crowe Ransom tended to define the mechanics of poetry in such detail that they may have helped spur a rebellion against traditional poetic techniques (at the same time as they inspired a lasting tradition of neoformalist poets). More importantly, as noted above, they explicitly defined the poem as a world in itself, operating by its own rules and having no necessary connection to discourse or referents outside the poem. As unpopular as these thinkers grew due to their perceived elitism, they created lasting norms for the reading and interpretation of poetry. They helped create the dilemma with which I began this section, the unpredictability and variability of poetry as a genre.
The roots of this dissociation of poetry lie in the withdrawal of the poet from the poem. While a certain school of poetry has placed the poet front and center and made personal travails or regrets the subject of the poem, the literary/experimental school has followed an American mutation of Romanticism in defining the poet—indeed the wise or scholarly American—by his or her lack of connections in the empirical world.