T. S. Eliot’s Cold, Snobby Guide to Poetry (Now with 90% More Dead Guys)

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ESSAY – JAVA & VERSE

What if greatness in poetry isn’t about your feelings, but your ability to disappear? T. S. Eliot thought so. And he said it with the intellectual force of a literary wrecking ball.

The Essay That Keeps Haunting Me

An English professor once handed me a stack of literary theories, as if they were polite interventions. I was emotionally raw, so naturally, I assumed the worst. One of the texts was T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent—a dense, icy essay I’ve come back to over the years, especially when I start thinking my writing is getting good.

Spoiler: Eliot never lets me feel good for long.

Tradition: Now with 90% More Dead Guys

Eliot opens by dragging the English for treating “tradition” as a brag or an excuse to never change. He’s not here for that. For him, tradition isn’t a safety blanket—it’s literary CrossFit. You don’t inherit it; you earn it. You read so much Dante and Shakespeare that their ghosts start charging rent in your brain. That’s Eliot’s idea of a “historical sense.”

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

If you’re not writing while haunted by the canon, Eliot’s judging you from his perch in the great library in the sky.

Your Poem Isn’t That Special

Next, Eliot drops the literary version of “you didn’t build that.” Your new poem? Cute. But it only matters in relation to what came before it. Tradition isn’t a one-way street—it’s a remix. Every time you drop a new metaphor, the canon must make room, like a snobby dinner party where you just showed up in a hoodie. The past adjusts—but only if your work is good enough to make it flinch.

Kill Your Ego, Save the Poem

Now for Eliot’s hottest take: great poetry isn’t about you. It’s not your diary entry. It’s not your breakup in verse. The poet should be like platinum in a chemical reaction—an invisible catalyst. You cause the emotional explosion, but leave no trace of yourself.

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Your angst? Irrelevant. Your personality? A liability. Eliot’s poetic hero is the anti-snowflake: invisible, ego-free, and built like a Greek grammar book.

He’s not just dunking on confessional poets—he’s challenging the cult of authenticity. Writing as therapy? Valid. Writing as art? That’s a different game. Great poetry doesn’t wallow in feeling; it refines it. And yes, it takes someone deeply emotional to understand the need to flee from emotion. Cue the mic drop.

Feelings? Meh.

Eliot closes by swinging at sincerity. Feeling something doesn’t mean you’ve written something worth reading. You can mean every word and still write a dud.

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.”

The emotion belongs to the poem, not the poet. So if you’re writing about your fifth breakup in six months, maybe skip the sad-girl sonnet and channel Ovid’s exile or the fall of Rome instead. Just a thought.

Final Thoughts: Eliot vs. Instagram Poets

In a world obsessed with “finding your voice” and “speaking your truth,” Eliot reads like a literary curmudgeon with a PhD in gatekeeping. But there’s a weird freedom in his elitism. He doesn’t want you to be original—he wants you to be excellent. That means burying your ego, studying like a maniac, and writing like you’ve time-traveled through the entire Western canon.

So, don’t ask, “How do I feel next time you write?” Ask, “Would this make Virgil roll over in his grave?”

And if that sounds exhausting, good. Eliot didn’t write for quitters. He wrote for ghosts with PhDs.

This post was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #378

10 thoughts on “T. S. Eliot’s Cold, Snobby Guide to Poetry (Now with 90% More Dead Guys)”

  2. I’ve been thinking about this one, Mangus, and I think I should comment.

    I talk a lot about Quality of work, and that’s what you’re getting at here. Or what Elliot was getting at. I see a lot of talented writers on this site, and I also see a lot of fantasy/horror stories. Hell, I wrote a thousand page one, and I love it. I know that’s what’s popular. I know some of our favorite writers are Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, and even RL Stine.

    But I think Elliot is right. This week I read “The Dead” by James Joyce for the first time. It’s a simple story about real people and a Christmas party. It made an incredible impression on me. It was one of the first stories to put the reader in the mind of the characters, especially the main character, Gilbert Conroy. The desire he feels for his glowing wife, and then the way he realizes she’s thinking about something else entirely is such a universal thing. In addition, my wife and I lost two parents this year, and sometimes the “What’s the point of it all?” question comes up with our grief. Joyce tells you what the point is. It’s right there.

    I’ve read Joyce before. Actually, I looked over some site that lists the best short stories, and I was amazed at how many of them I’ve read. I’ve read Portrait of the Artist at least twice, and it’s one of the first (literary) books I remember making an impression on me. I read Ulysses, and put it in my front line library. I don’t know if I understood any of it, but at the end I knew I’d read something great.

    Elliot called “The Dead” the best short story ever written. I think I might agree. And I think, instead of fooling around, we all need to be using our talents to try to do something just as good. We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to our readers. I’ve got a writer friend at work who’s got great chops, better than me. His shit is so well done, but all he writes is middle grade horror. Goosebumps stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but everyone’s doing it. I told him I’m going to start pressing him to do more important stuff. Real stuff. Me too. It’s the quality of our work that counts, and I want our words to be forever.

    Thanks for this post Magnus. It’s important. The goal might not be easy, but it’s worth trying for.

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    1. You’ve been sitting with this one, and I can feel it in every line. Joyce has a way of crawling under the ribcage and making you look at your own life in a harsher, cleaner light. The Dead does that more quietly than almost anything else we call “literary.” It’s just people, memory, desire, and the ache of being alive—and somehow that lands harder than any monster we can invent.
      I agree with you that quality matters, maybe more than anything. The world doesn’t need more noise; it needs writers willing to risk saying something honest. And yeah, it’s tempting to stay where it’s comfortable—genre lanes, familiar tropes, the stuff that feels good to produce. There’s no shame in any of that. Sometimes a well-written middle-grade horror story does more for a reader’s heart than a dense classic.
      But I’ll push back on one thing: I don’t think writing “real stuff” only happens in one neighborhood of the map. A fantasy world can carry more truth than a memoir. A ghost story can reveal a wound the writer hasn’t named yet. The important thing isn’t the container—it’s whether the writer is digging for the nerve and not just the pulse.
      Still, the fact that you’re challenging yourself, your friend, and the rest of us to reach for something that lasts… that’s the good kind of pressure. That’s the kind that makes the work sharper, braver, more worth the hours we bleed into it.
      And you’re right: we owe our words more than convenience. We owe them intention.
      Appreciate you taking the time to think this through and say it out loud. Conversations like this keep the bar exactly where it should be.

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      Reply

      1. I don’t mean to sell any genre short: I do love fantasy; there’s so much room to explore and reveal real things in there; I guess that’s all I’m hoping for, writers to find the real emotions within the realms of their imaginations, like I said, I love my fantasy cycle; I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, even as I get to a few years post-completion

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