'Because books follow one another, despite our habit of judging them separately.' – A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf Eliot's philosophical view on modern literature takes a Platonic point of view in relation to imitation, or more precisely the art of imitation. Eliot states that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, while good poets transform it into something better, or at least something different.' His poem "The Waste Land" echoes this idea of ​​imitating a work of art to produce something new, apparently a text like The Waste Land "has a fundamentally dramatic character"; (p. 11 Macmillan) and within the notion of modernity the reader faces the complex task of connecting with any intention of the author. However, a key aspect of modernist literature was to imitate everyday life, essentially the roles are reversed as everyday life, particularly in the modernist era, often imitated art. Eliot references a great deal of literature and language within his work, and ironically finds his originality through his extensive imitation "in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways". (p. 18 Macmillan) If one agrees with the notion of art imitating life and vice versa, then one can argue that originality is not the main goal, but rather the subjective individuality assigned to the text. Critical theorist Frank Kermode, found the art of imitation pleasurable, analyzing the canon Kermode states that the canonical texts "completely stuck in their time, their texts as frozen as devoted scholars can make them, their own language increasingly remote ". '(Kermode: p 29) . Yet he goes on to say that, paradoxically, the works of writers, "by this very fact, are freed from time." Kermode......middle of paper......and his classification of beauty. Once again there is a direct connection with religion and the Virgin Mary whereby Eliot draws a connection between the physical beauty of this woman ("Belladonna") and the moral beauty encapsulated in the story of Mary in the Bible. The importance of this reference can be noted in Eliot's essay, 'Tradition and Individual Talent', in which he describes how history is a timeless influence on any author or artist, this is not a form of plagiarism, rather a inevitable notion of influence. bound in the bones of the author. "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional." (ref) Indeed, Eliot shows his appreciation for "the dead poets and artists" by frequently referencing the likes of William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri.