In a way, Joyce may be said to have been the greatest poet of his age, yet he is a poet whose poetics — in the sense of his theories of poetics and of literature in general — have disappeared, thereby provoking another type of disappearance. His poetics can be said "extinctive" in the double sense of the word: making extinct and working towards their own extinction. Keeping in mind Eliot's contrast between the poets who believe in their theories, and those who use them in order to refine their sensibilities, one can attempt to link Joyce's "unbelief with a certain type of theoretical aphasia.