T. S. Eliot in the context of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"

Publius Vergilius Maro (Classical Latin: [ˈpuːbliʊs wɛrˈɡɪliʊs ˈmaroː]; 15 October 70 BC – 21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil (/ˈvɜːrdʒɪl/ VUR-jil) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. Some minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars regard these as spurious, with the possible exception of some short pieces.

Already acclaimed in his lifetime as a classic author, Virgil rapidly replaced Ennius and other earlier authors as a standard school text, and stood as the most popular Latin poet through late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, exerting major influence on Western literature. Geoffrey Chaucer assigned Virgil a uniquely prominent position in history in The House of Fame (1374–85), describing him as standing on a pilere / that was of tinned yren clere ("on a pillar that was of bright tin-plated iron"), and in the Divine Comedy, in which Virgil appears as the author's guide through Hell and Purgatory, Dante pays tribute to Virgil with the words tu se' solo colui da cu'io tolsi / lo bello stile che m'ha fatto onore (Inf. I.86–7) ("thou art alone the one from whom I took the beautiful style that has done honour to me"). In the 20th Century, T. S. Eliot famously began a lecture on the subject "What Is a Classic?" by asserting as self-evidently true that "whatever the definition we arrive at, it cannot be one which excludes Virgil – we may say confidently that it must be one which will expressly reckon with him."

Poetic tradition is a concept similar to that of the poetic or literary canon (a body of works of significant literary merit, instrumental in shaping Western culture and modes of thought). The concept of poetic tradition has been commonly used as a part of historical literary criticism, in which a poet or author is evaluated in the context of his historical period, his immediate literary influences or predecessors, and his literary contemporaries. T. S. Eliot claimed in Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1919, that for a poet to fully come into his own, he must be aware of his predecessors, and view the work of his predecessors as living, not dead. The poetic tradition is a line of descent of poets who have achieved a sublime state and can surrender themselves to their work to create a poem that both builds on existing tradition and stands on its own.

The necessity of a poet to be aware of his place in relation to his poem and to his tradition, to surrender himself to his work and to the great masters preceding him, is revisited by Harold Bloom in his 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom argued that each and every “great poet” must struggle with and overcome the anxiety of weakly imitating his predecessor poets. Bloom grounded his arguments on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (notably Genealogy of Morals) and Sigmund Freud, though he disagrees with the tendency of both authors to “over-idealize the imagination.” To Bloom, a poetic tradition is a tradition of creative misreading, with each upcoming poet clearing a space in the poetic tradition for himself or herself by alleging some inconsistency, or mistake, or insufficient progress on the part of his or her predecessor(s). He cites multiple examples in this work and in his other work on the same topic, A Map of Misreading, published in 1975. One of these is the multiplicity of misreadings by poets and critics—including T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, and Percy Shelley—of Milton’s epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920). The essay is also available in Eliot's Selected Prose and Selected Essays.

While Eliot is most often known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary criticism. In this dual role, he acted as a cultural critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the better-known works that Eliot produced in his critic capacity. It formulates Eliot's influential conception of the relationship between the poet and preceding literary traditions.

Boni & Liveright (pronounced "BONE-eye" and "LIV-right") is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.

It was the first American publisher of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays. In his biography of Horace Liveright, Firebrand, author Tom Dardis noted B&L was "the most magnificent yet messy publishing firm this century has seen." In 1974 Liveright's remaining backlist was bought by W. W. Norton & Company. Norton revived the name as an imprint in 2012 as Liveright Publishing Corporation.

The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated is a poem by the English author Samuel Johnson. It was written in late 1748 and published in 1749 (see 1749 in poetry). It was begun and completed while Johnson was busy writing A Dictionary of the English Language and it was the first published work to include Johnson's name on the title page.

As the subtitle suggests, it is an imitation of Satire X by the Latin poet Juvenal. Unlike Juvenal, Johnson attempts to sympathize with his poetic subjects. Also, the poem focuses on human futility and humanity's quest after greatness like Juvenal but concludes that Christian values are important to living properly. It was Johnson's second imitation of Juvenal (the first being his 1738 poem London). Unlike London, The Vanity of Human Wishes emphasizes philosophy over politics. The poem was not a financial success, but later critics, including Walter Scott and T. S. Eliot, considered it to be Johnson's greatest poem. Howard D. Weinbrot called it "one of the great poems in the English language".

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (c. 1915–1962).

Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".

Hampstead (/ˈhæmpstɪd, -stɛd/) is an area in London, England, which lies 4 miles (6.4 km) northwest of Charing Cross, located mainly in the London Borough of Camden, with a small part in the London Borough of Barnet. It borders Highgate and Golders Green to the north, Belsize Park to the south and is surrounded from the northeast by Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland.

Hampstead is known for its intellectual, artistic, liberal, and literary associations. It contains a number of listed buildings, such as Burgh House, Kenwood House, the Spaniard's Inn, and the Everyman cinema. With some of the most expensive housing in London, Hampstead has had many notable residents, both past and present, including King Constantine II of Greece and his wife Queen Anne Marie, Helena Bonham Carter, Agatha Christie, T. S. Eliot, Jon English, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Jim Henson, George Orwell, Harry Styles, Jedward, Tim Burton, Martin Freeman and Elizabeth Taylor. As of 2004, Hampstead has been home to more Prime Ministers, and contains more millionaires within its boundaries, than any other area of the United Kingdom.

Jane Ellen Harrison (9 September 1850 – 15 April 1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to Ellen's death in 1903. The depth and influence of Harrison’s friendship with Eugénie Sellers Strong—ended by a dramatic breech in the 1890s—is explored in a monograph by Mary Beard: after their breakup Sellers became an influential authority on the material culture of Imperial Rome, while Harrison’s work dug deeper and deeper into the primitive ritual origins of Greek drama. Though moving in different directions chronologically, in terms of their focus, the women appear otherwise as doppelgängers of one another in their concerns, style and characteristic forms of argument deriving from an approach that became known as classical anthropology. Harrison’s Prolegomena to Greek Religion had a compelling and inspirational impact on the later artworks of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle and her scholarly legerdemain was formative to the group of classicists known as the Cambridge ritualists.