Borges, Jorge Luis - Nicholas Shumway (essay date 1986)

Nicholas Shumway (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: “Eliot, Borges, and Tradition,” in Borges the Poet, edited by Carlos Cortinez, The University of Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 260-67.

[In the following essay, Shumway considers the similarities between Borges and T. S. Eliot regarding their ideas about tradition and individual talent.]

Except for an Eliot poem Borges translated and a footnote in “Kafka y sus precursores,” one finds little reason to link Eliot and Borges. Eliot is frequently defined and dismissed by his oft-quoted statement that he was an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a royalist in politics and a classicist in literature. Borges, on the other hand, flees such neat, all-encompassing categorizations, and prefers to cultivate the charming image of a genial skeptic and self-effacing writer who questions everything, including the value of his own work. Despite these obvious differences, in style as well as in substance, on at least...

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