Doctrine of Impersonality Anonymous College

In Anglo-American interwar modernism, poetics of impersonality might be tracked along two chief lines—that of T.S. Eliot and that of William Carlos Williams. The two, it should be noted, were antagonists. (Or, at least Williams hated Eliot and committed his feelings to print throughout his life. Eliot simply ignored Williams and all of his work, a more passive aggressive form of disdain but disdain nonetheless.) It’s not always a clear-cut division, but it’s a useful heuristic structure to use at the outset of our studies.

Eliot’s “doctrine of impersonality,” as Charles Altieri calls it, led to a form of scientism and metaphysics whereby some poets insisted upon treating the text as an object divorceable from the conditions wherein it was produced, including all ties to the author and his (usually “his”) life. He originated these ideas in 1919, and he would tweak them in the 1930s as he became more politically and culturally conservative, following his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and renunciation of his American citizenship. His general belief in art’s absolute autonomy informed the New Criticism, who originated the practices of close reading to legitimize the study of literature as a valid pursuit in a culture that...