No doubt W. H. Auden did not intend any reference to T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in his famous poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’. But even in 1940, Eliot's distinction between the man who suffers and the mind that creates (the mind that created the mind, in Freud's case) was a linchpin of twentieth-century criticism: its influence had already reoriented criticism towards the poem and away from the poet and would stimulate W. K. Wimsatt's more philosophical exposition of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946). Soon after, Harold Bloom's ‘anxiety of influence’ more pugnaciously continued the textual conversation with the dead, though in a rivalrous and agonistic vein only hinted at in Eliot's understanding of tradition (and disavowing any influence of Eliot himself). Finally, in the post-structuralist intertextualities of the 1980s, the theory that had begun life on the tide of Eliot's early desire to secure a more communitarian ground for the practices of authorship than the disembodied and individualistic Romantic theory of inspiration, was now exposed, in the most paradoxical swerve of all, as the distal cause of the death of all authors. The question of authorship, of who or what produces poems, and of legacies, of who or what continues the conversation with them, would emerge as one of the major chords of modern literary theory, continuing to sound through feminist, New Historicist and cultural materialist discussion for the rest of the century.