3 - Walter de la Mare's ideal reader
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
Summary
About six months before Eliot published ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Walter de la Mare wrote a series of newspaper articles on the business of reading. Intended as a general meditation on the subject from the author's point of view, it came to a conclusion about the author's part in the reading process that, at first glance, would trouble no one – except, perhaps, Eliot: ‘A book is a mirror reflecting its author – his thoughts, desires, dreams, illusions, disillusionments. It may be as “impersonal” as was the primeval block of granite from which was hewn the Sphinx, but its very impersonality is an indication of his being and character.’
On a second glance, however, de la Mare's point about impersonality becomes rather more opaque, and rather closer to Eliot's. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ declares that ‘honest and sensitive criticism is directed at the work, rather than its author’, and a generation of critics took this to mean that biographical criticism was irrelevant. But coming from the opposite direction, de la Mare had anticipated them, for if a book is a perfect mirror of its author, then any impersonality reflects the impersonality of the author's being and character too, an ambiguity which collapses the most biographical reading possible into the least.
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- British Poetry in the Age of Modernism , pp. 108 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005