William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot are two popular names in the history of English literature. These two people have a great contribution to English literature. Their contribution helped English literature a lot to be enriched.
It is known to all that William Wordsworth brought a big change in the history of English literature. He along with his close friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and with it, they started a new age in English literature called Romantic Age.
The poems that were published in Lyrical Ballads, were different than the poems of the neo-classical age. However, these types of poems were not very popular among the contemporary people of that society. To give the idea of these new kinds of poems, Wordsworth put a preface essay in the second edition (Published in January 1801) of Lyrical Ballads, and then it was greatly expanded in the third edition published in 1802.
Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is known as an unofficial manifesto of the English Romantic Movement. It played a vital role in bringing a major change in the literary arena with its emphasis on imagination, spontaneity, feeling and simplicity. It went against all rigid rules in the literature that left nothing to freedom and nature. Poets who came after him followed it as the elements of Romantic poems.
T. S. Eliot was one of the famous English poets of 20th century England. He got a huge reputation as a playwright, literary and social critic rather than a poet. In his poems, he has criticized contemporary English society. Though he was born more than a hundred years later from Wordsworth, he talked in favor of tradition and past. Because of his thoughts, he was thought to be anti-romantic. His view went against the Romantic view that poetry is a way of self-expression.
In his critic ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, he criticized most of Wordsworth’s views given in ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’. He strongly disagreed with the concept of individuality.
If we look at the poems and critics written by T. S. Eliot, we can see that he was influenced by classicism. We can find classical elements in his writings. Hardly any writer of his time was as much classical as like him. It might happen to him because he read classical poets with great interest at an early age.
We can find a lot of dissimilarities between Wordsworth and Eliot. The biggest difference between them is classicism. We should know that romantic poets were totally against the use of classical elements in their writings. For this reason, we cannot see the use of classical elements in Wordsworth’s poems. Eliot was just the opposite of Wordsworth when it came to the use of classical elements in poems. It was very surprising to see him supporting classical views despite being a 20th-century writer. He was a big fan of Dante who was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker.
Wordsworth disagrees with the classical or neo-classical views that poetry is just an imitation of nature. According to him, poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. However, Eliot did not agree with this view. He said that poetry is not at all a spontaneous expression of powerful feelings. There is a conscious and deliberate effort in making a poem.
We can see that Eliot put much emphasis on the theme of tradition. What is tradition? It is a consciousness of the past. When someone gains consciousness of the past, he becomes traditional. To understand his responsibilities and difficulties as an artist, the poet should understand the past. One can judge the value of his creation by considering it with the past.
He said that being traditional is very important both to his criticism and to his creative work. In fact, he opposed the Romantic theory, which regarded poetry as the expression of the personality of the poet. The Romantic theory did not attach any significance to tradition.
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