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 same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility", which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term "metaphysical". His 1922 poem "The Waste Land" also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic. He had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, "The Waste