T.S. Eliot’s impersonality : a study of the personae in Eliot’s major poems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a study of T. S. Eliot's "impersonal" theory of poetry, particularly as it affected his own poetic work. To this end it focuses upon Eliot's personae in order to demonstrate the extent to which his concern with personality influenced his poetry and, in addition, how the theory and the poetry developed together throughout his career. Eliot's original distrust of personality in poetry was based upon two distinct, though related, tenets. First, he held that poetry (indeed, all art) is--or should be--"ideal" in the classic sense. That is, it should reflect the type, not the individual, the form, not the personality, the absolute, not the transient. Second, he distrusted human nature itself, and therefore doubted the value of the individual human personality. The first of these tenets, the poetic theory, received its first and most extreme airing in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; the second, the view of human nature, coloured most of the early poetry. The resulting distrust of human personality, combined with Eliot's clear knowledge of the temptations of romantic self-expression, led him to develop a series of personae and other poetic devices with which he could disguise his own voice. At the same time, however, Eliot was concerned with exploring the limitations of the human personality. Consequently, most of the early major poems--"Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," and "Gerontion," for example--employ impersonal narrators in order to examine, in part, the excesses and failures of personality. In "The Waste Land" Eliot's characteristic dramatic narrator began to become less distinctly apparent, though Eliot was still reluctant to use his own voice. And although in the "Ariel" poems he returned to the genre of the dramatic monologue, he began to investigate the possibility of human salvation rather than of human hopelessness. At the same time, in "Ash Wednesday" he began to record his own personal record of spiritual doubt and hope. This development reached its conclusion in the "Four Quartets" where by reconciling his own limited human experience with an absolute and eternal world, he was finally able to speak freely of his own life in his own voice without lapsing into the romantic fallacies he feared as a young man.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".