T.S. Eliot seems to be somewhat of an opposite to Romanticism. He puts more emphasis on tradition and reading past poets than Wordsworth and Coleridge did. Romantics focused more on the individual and creating something new while Eliot seems to say that you must read past poets because you will be compared to them. Eliot says, "No poet, no artist of any art, has ahis complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (1093). A poet must know the forms of poetry and develop skills before their work can become unique. We have to be aware of the poetry of the past so we can create our own tradition.

Unlike the Romantic poems, T.S. Eliot does not see poetry as a spontaneous outpouring of feelings and emotion, but sees it as a collection of emotions and images stored up over time. Eliot says, "If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark" (1096). If I remember anything from Romantic class its that the sublime was the big goal. It was like the holy grail for Romantic poets. Now, I kind of like the notion of the sublime, where you see or experience something so beautiful that you just can't help but try to capture those feelings in a poem. It's a nice notion, but I know I've never experienced something that intense in my life, and if I did, I know I would never be able to capture it in words in a way that would make people want to read it over and over again. So, I also like Eliot's notion of poetry. I think it's more attainable than what the Romantics write about.

Eliot takes the approach that a man's experiences are not necessarily reflected in his poetry. It's the "medium" that's important, not the "personality." And the emotions in the poetry may not really be important to the poet. The poet should not have to strive for the sublime, for some new incredible emotional experince. "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinay ones and , in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.