One of the things that chiefly distinguishes William Logan’s thinking about poetry from that of other critics is the reasonable separation he grants between the poet and the poem. That is to say, Logan reads poetry neither as if it were a mirror of the poet’s soul, nor does he read it, as post-structuralist theory demands, as mere “text,” as a depersonalized artifact composed from all other poetic texts.

In Reputations of the Tongue, his second collection of essays and reviews, Logan opens with a discussion of T. S. Eliot’s classic 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” He lays out the points at which his thinking diverges from Eliot’s, specifically regarding Eliot’s ideas about “impersonality.” Eliot believed that individual personality was often an impediment to genuine poetic expression. Consequently he suggested that the poet should seek the “extinction” of personality in order that the mind might function as a medium for the conveyance of impersonal poetic emotion, a neutral receptacle for “seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” Many critics have felt that an eerie passivity marks Eliot’s theory of poetic creation (though Eliot did famously note that “of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things”). Logan promulgates a more active role for the poet. In “The Condition of the Individual Talent” he writes that