SOURCE: “Eliot, Borges, and Tradition,” in Borges the Poet, edited by Carlos Cortinez, The University of Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 260-67.

In the following essay, Shumway considers the similarities between Borges and T. S. Eliot regarding their ideas about tradition and individual talent.

Except for an Eliot poem Borges translated and a footnote in “Kafka y sus precursores,” one finds little reason to link Eliot and Borges. Eliot is frequently defined and dismissed by his oft-quoted statement that he was an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a royalist in politics and a classicist in literature. Borges, on the other hand, flees such neat, all-encompassing categorizations, and prefers to cultivate the charming image of a genial skeptic and self-effacing writer who questions everything, including the value of his own work. Despite these obvious differences, in style as well as in substance, on at least two central points, Eliot and Borges are not...