In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot stated the position with almost shocking emphasis: the poet has, riot a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected, ways.
A view of art so thoroughly organic as this implies as a corollary an impersonal art; that is, that the work grows in accordance with some inner principle of its own being, and is not merely the Creature of the writer’s ego, either as an expression of his feelings as a man or as an assertion of his opinions.
The relations among the parts that make up the art work become the important matter for critical investigation. That relationship is conceived to be complex. Eliot even suggests that the work of art is to be regarded as an organism, alive with a life of its own.
Such an emphasis was bound to bring down upon Eliot the charge that he had reduced the poet to automation who secreted his poem in some unconscious and brainless way, and that he had thus committed himself to the most “romantic” theory possible.