Eliot's views on personality in poetry seem to have two phases … but offer no serious contradiction. The impersonality of the poet creates a set of poems which add up to a distinct and significant personality: the poems have the personality. The first half of this proposition, the purging of "all the accidents of personal emotion" from the poem, is not much cherished these days….

Few critics are now as eager as Eliot was to separate "art" from "the event," "the mind which creates" from "the man who suffers."

Indeed, Eliot himself is supposed to have said that The Waste Land was "only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." But then he may have meant only that he thought The Waste Land was not a great poem, and while there are poets we must simply disfigure...