Objective criticism shifts the emphasis from the poet to the poem, elevates the critic's role, and creates for poetry a separate, aesthetic space. A pair of seminal essays paves the way: Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864) and T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917). You will master Arnold's famous distinction between epochs of concentration and epochs of expansion, and ponder Eliot's anti-Romantic call for a return to tradition and a new, depersonalized view of the poet.