The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.

Eliot’s remark frames poetic “self-expression” as inseparable from history. Even when a poet seems most personal—writing out of private feeling, memory, or temperament—the resulting work inevitably registers the pressures, idioms, beliefs, and crises of the poet’s age. The “great poet” is therefore not merely a diarist of inner life but a medium through which a period becomes articulate. The line also implies a standard for greatness: the capacity to embody one’s time without reducing poetry to reportage, allowing the individual voice to become a form in which collective experience is clarified and preserved.