PREFACE

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 13:35:13 +0000

Harold Bloom has once observed:"All literature is plagiarism. It wages Oedipal wars with its predecessors".It's Bloom's attempt to "de-idealise"literay influences which perhaps impelled him into making such a sweeping observation. But to his surprise, his predictions proved correct,and especially in post-modern contemporary poetry,there are extensive indications to show-case the examples of "tradition"becoming the leit-motif,more specifically in poetry. In Eliot's own poetry, for instance, in his tour de force of a poem, "The Waste Land",there is a heavy influence of the French symbolist poets, Ezra Pound, Mellarme and Malaraux. Eliot has once said: "Immature poets imitate, while the mature steal". Eliot's oeuvre carries on,what he calls, the twin burdens of influences, "Tradition and individual Talent",in tandemHe has succeeded in securely laying the scaffold for a new," trendy " poetry that influenced many generations of post-modern writing.