"Not Known, Because Not Looked for": Eliot's Debt to Browning (T. S. Eliot, Robert Browning) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his criticism and in his poetry, T.S. Eliot openly acknowledges many of his literary influences. He dedicates The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, the friend and editor whom he terms 'il miglior fabbro." He maintains that Dante and Shakespeare "divide the world between them," praises the immediacy of the Metaphysical poets, and notes that he himself began writing poetry under the combined influence of the French Symbolists and the Jacobean playwrights (1928: viii). Most important, Eliot elects his predecessors through a poetics of allusion: his appropriation of phrases culled from far-flung poetic traditions serves both to construct meaning within a given poem and to locate Eliot within a poetic tradition of his own making. **********