ELIOT APPROACHED Indic traditions not only through philosophy and religion but through literature as well. Two great heritages, European and American, combined to offer important precursors and a formidable poetic past to master. One of the paradoxes of this past was that, for Eliot, the major figures in the transmission of Indic influence – Goethe, Emerson, Whitman, and Yeats – were all poets about whom he, at first, had held serious reservations. He regarded them as large and capacious but suspiciously romantic and overextended, and opposed them, in his personal canon, to the metaphysical, witty, and ironic, though minor voices of, among others, Laforgue and Baudelaire. As Gregory Jay has effectively demonstrated in his extended study of Eliot's literary genealogy, this opposition was no doubt defensive (75).l Eliot admitted that many minor literary figures were vital to him, in part simply because they were minor (TCC 18) and thus did not overwhelm or unduly influence him, but provided useful models.