Beginning of Essay
Their respective essays ‘Tradition And The Individual Talent’ and ‘Modern Fiction’ serve only to underline the tremendous difference in the views of Eliot and Woolf with regard to literary tradition and the role of the artist. Eliot sees it ....

Middle of Essay
.... must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.” He goes on to analogise the poetic process to the scientific experiment. Whilst it is tempting to see this as a negation of the creative process. Eliot’s later remarks lead us irresistibly to think in terms of the earlier alchemists and their somewhat romantic mystical aura rather than some cold clinical experiment. This attitude again presupposes the poet in the role of a catalyst. Woolf’s ideas in ‘Modern Fiction’ are the antithesis of those of Eliot. She begins by suggesting, “it ....