Read it through once

No poet, no artist of any form, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, does not exist in isolation. History is shaped by a series of enduring rates of change, and what seems to be a development is often the reinterpretation of an earlier fact by a later mind. The personality of the artist is less important than his relation to the literary tradition; the tradition and the individual talent are interdependent, each invigorating and altering the other.