Robert Langbaum Information Agency. He has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University (1961-2), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1969-1970), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1972-3), the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Studies (1982), and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (1987), and grants from American Council of Learned Societies (1961, 75-6). Langbaum’s first book, (1957), takes issue with T. S. Eliot whom he admires as poet and critic. He objects, however, to Eliot’s redrawing of the literary tradition as beginning with the early seventeenth-century witty poets and the witty side of Shakespeare. Eliot names this
T. S. Eliot [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind." In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work