T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History

Gregory Jay uses such approaches as psychoanalysis and deconstruction to examine the development of Eliot's ambivalent attitude toward past voices. Eliot's primary struggle, Jay argues, was to rewrite his many poetic inheritances, transfiguring the texts of the dead. Jay begins his study by showing how Eliot's poetic and personal anxieties shaped his modernist rewriting of literary history, creating versions of such authors as Dante, Shakespeare, and Virgil that were less astute critical portraits than troubled self reflections.