ABSTRACT
Postmodern theory’s most enlivening contribution to literary scholarship could easily prove to be the privileging of just that personal voice which this collection of essays invites us to explore. We are now quite distant from those earlier twentieth-century critical practices which accepted clear distinctions between objective and subjective discourses. We, indeed I, no longer believe such distinctions are valid or even possible. Even poets in that period of high modernism sought to cultivate the extinction of the personality and the use of “objective correlatives,” terms that later became an embarrassment for T. S. Eliot, who formed and used them in his critical essays. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot argues that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrificing, a continued extinction of personality.” Here, too, he claims “Poetry is . . . an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but the extinction of personality,” expanding on his assertion that “It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science” (Eliot, 1950: 7, 10). In this last decade of the twentieth century, we find all manner of writers – poets, critics, linguists and generalists – who use the personal voice and the personal pronouns.
