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Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, moved to England in 1914 when he was twenty-five, became a British subject in 1927, and subsequently renounced his American citizenship. Which is to say, our (at least my department's) classification of The Waste Land (1922) and "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) as American literature is based on a technicality.
If the essay is itself any indication, its author certainly thought of himself as British. Eliot's first sentence makes it clear he's centering himself in the English mind: "In English writing we seldom speak of tradition," he begins. His second paragraph makes it even clearer, distinguishing the English mind from the French: "We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are 'more critical' than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous." That parenthesis! I'm so English that not only do I know our national character from the inside, I also dare to name our national faults. And in this pseudo tut-tutting manner, in a paternalistic parenthesis, at that. It's great.
In a previous post I mentioned that Eliot wrote the introduction to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and I said of Nightwood that it's concerned with categories of "race" and "racial" character. Eliot is too, here, briefly: the sentence before the one I quoted above begins, "Every nation, every race, has not only its creative, but its own critical turn of mind...." I don't think that now in 2020 we're much less prone to generalization, or less likely to act in the vein of a national character, i.e., to act like our neighbors. But "race" is a fighting word for us these days in a way it wasn't, a hundred years ago, for these two technically American but really European writers.
As far as I can tell, Eliot's "tradition" is what we now call the canon. Also a fighting word these days, in its way. The artistic tradition comprises monuments, those great works of art which continually inspire, and is both ever-existent and perfect as is and ever-changing to accommodate the introduction of new monuments, each of which adds its own part to the tradition's already-perfect but now newly-perfect perfection:
The artist--the poet, really, is Eliot's focus--writing in this tradition must therefore have "the historical sense":
Oh, just that, then. No pressure, right? But that's Eliot's point: the pressure is real. When you have the historical sense, when you understand the greatness of the tradition you wish your poetry to participate in, you see how small you are in relation. To the artist who has the historical sense,
I'll come back to this idea of self-sacrifice, or rather the essay will. It's soon clear in what follows that Eliot is really arguing against the Romantic poets, which goes to show how much they influenced his poetics: you are not free when you are passionate, either for or against. Eliot wouldn't like being called passionate--it was the Romantics who were passionate, who set such store on emotion, and in that way they went wrong--and indeed his tone is perfectly cool. The coolness with which he shreds Wordsworth's phrase describing the origin of poetry, "emotion recollected in tranquillity," is a case in point. Let's not call Eliot passionate then, but he is bound, for one by the felt imperative to shred Wordsworth's phrase at all: coolly done or not, it is done, and coolly done doesn't mean casually done.
I'll also come back to this idea of Eliot's being bound to the Romantic poets. In the meantime, if the Romantics went wrong cultivating sensibility, they also went wrong cultivating genius, thinking of poetic genius as the source of their poetry. Their idea of the creative genius is I think what Eliot means by personality. He calls the alternative theory he is putting forth in this essay an "Impersonal theory of poetry," and sums it up in a sentence that comes after the allusion to Wordsworth:
Fighting words. Because let me be accurate: I just called this sentence a summary, but it's also an escalation. The summary is in the two parts of the sentence defining what poetry is not; the escalation is in the positive statements of what poetry is: an escape. Eliot is being provocative vis-à-vis the Romantics. Yet at the same time, he is also being vulnerable before them. He's admitting himself bound--not to them, but to the very two things they saw as the source of their poetry. You don't have to "escape" something unless it's holding you back. Yet again, however, at the same same time, Eliot claims the means of escape--poetry which really belongs in the tradition--and he is not, after all, truly bound.
You know where I'm going next: nope, despite his rhetorical acrobatics, Eliot still is bound, to the very Romantics he's (implicitly) denying a place in the tradition. Here's why he's bound, there are two reasons. First, defining what poetry is in terms of escape is really to talk further about what it is not. It's the difference between escaping from and escaping to. In the former case you're still talking the captors' language; only in the latter case do you have positive terms of your own. The second reason is related to the first and will bring me (finally!) to my next point: Eliot has spent half and more of his essay presenting a case against the Romantics--against emotion and personality--rather than making a case of his own.
Eliot's own case is not about poetic provenance but about poetic process--which is really more interesting, because it's analyzable, actionable, learnable. Theoretically, that is. With all of tradition thrumming in your bones and staring you in the face it might be hard to analyze, act, learn, or do anything other than what Eliot says you should do--give up your personality--and toss your pen along with it. If you manage not to despair, though, it might be useful to know that, according to Eliot, writing poetry is a matter of synthesis and integration; of "combination," "fusion," "transmutation," "concentration." The poet's mind is a kind of crucible--
--and the composition of poetry a kind of alchemy. I'm just happening to use a medieval model, it's what occurred to me, but Eliot's choice of analogy is taken from modern chemistry: the poet's mind is the filament of platinum catalyzing the chemical transformation of oxygen and sulphur dioxide into sulphuric acid. Poetry as acid--I don't know whether I love it or hate it! The poet's mind as a sliver of precious metal is nice though?
Anyway, the rest of what I have to say is just the oft-said, that Eliot's essay heavily influenced the American New Criticism of the mid century. "To divert interest from the poet to the poetry," Eliot writes, "is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad." The critic's focus should be on the poem, not the poet. Furthermore, in my understanding of New Criticism--which I expect will be developed further when I read The Well Wrought Urn--some of its key words were paradox, irony, balance; the poem was conceptualized as an artifact which resolved the first by the use of the second to achieve the third (to be super schematic about it). I saw something of this adumbrated in Eliot's brief analysis of a passage from The Revenger's Tragedy:
I don't know what Eliot means by "a new art emotion" here, nor do I quite understand the distinction he makes elsewhere in the essay between "emotions" and "feelings." I do though very much like his idea of tradition--unfashionable though I believe it is to admit such a thing--and have pressed the point of his indebtedness to the Romantics--which I understand everyone does now. So that balances me out, between fashion and unfashion? In any case, and in conclusion, I feel the need to apologize for this behemoth of a post. Hopefully I'll not write one so long again!
If the essay is itself any indication, its author certainly thought of himself as British. Eliot's first sentence makes it clear he's centering himself in the English mind: "In English writing we seldom speak of tradition," he begins. His second paragraph makes it even clearer, distinguishing the English mind from the French: "We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are 'more critical' than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous." That parenthesis! I'm so English that not only do I know our national character from the inside, I also dare to name our national faults. And in this pseudo tut-tutting manner, in a paternalistic parenthesis, at that. It's great.
In a previous post I mentioned that Eliot wrote the introduction to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and I said of Nightwood that it's concerned with categories of "race" and "racial" character. Eliot is too, here, briefly: the sentence before the one I quoted above begins, "Every nation, every race, has not only its creative, but its own critical turn of mind...." I don't think that now in 2020 we're much less prone to generalization, or less likely to act in the vein of a national character, i.e., to act like our neighbors. But "race" is a fighting word for us these days in a way it wasn't, a hundred years ago, for these two technically American but really European writers.
As far as I can tell, Eliot's "tradition" is what we now call the canon. Also a fighting word these days, in its way. The artistic tradition comprises monuments, those great works of art which continually inspire, and is both ever-existent and perfect as is and ever-changing to accommodate the introduction of new monuments, each of which adds its own part to the tradition's already-perfect but now newly-perfect perfection:
what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
The artist--the poet, really, is Eliot's focus--writing in this tradition must therefore have "the historical sense":
the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
Oh, just that, then. No pressure, right? But that's Eliot's point: the pressure is real. When you have the historical sense, when you understand the greatness of the tradition you wish your poetry to participate in, you see how small you are in relation. To the artist who has the historical sense,
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
I'll come back to this idea of self-sacrifice, or rather the essay will. It's soon clear in what follows that Eliot is really arguing against the Romantic poets, which goes to show how much they influenced his poetics: you are not free when you are passionate, either for or against. Eliot wouldn't like being called passionate--it was the Romantics who were passionate, who set such store on emotion, and in that way they went wrong--and indeed his tone is perfectly cool. The coolness with which he shreds Wordsworth's phrase describing the origin of poetry, "emotion recollected in tranquillity," is a case in point. Let's not call Eliot passionate then, but he is bound, for one by the felt imperative to shred Wordsworth's phrase at all: coolly done or not, it is done, and coolly done doesn't mean casually done.
I'll also come back to this idea of Eliot's being bound to the Romantic poets. In the meantime, if the Romantics went wrong cultivating sensibility, they also went wrong cultivating genius, thinking of poetic genius as the source of their poetry. Their idea of the creative genius is I think what Eliot means by personality. He calls the alternative theory he is putting forth in this essay an "Impersonal theory of poetry," and sums it up in a sentence that comes after the allusion to Wordsworth:
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
Fighting words. Because let me be accurate: I just called this sentence a summary, but it's also an escalation. The summary is in the two parts of the sentence defining what poetry is not; the escalation is in the positive statements of what poetry is: an escape. Eliot is being provocative vis-à-vis the Romantics. Yet at the same time, he is also being vulnerable before them. He's admitting himself bound--not to them, but to the very two things they saw as the source of their poetry. You don't have to "escape" something unless it's holding you back. Yet again, however, at the same same time, Eliot claims the means of escape--poetry which really belongs in the tradition--and he is not, after all, truly bound.
You know where I'm going next: nope, despite his rhetorical acrobatics, Eliot still is bound, to the very Romantics he's (implicitly) denying a place in the tradition. Here's why he's bound, there are two reasons. First, defining what poetry is in terms of escape is really to talk further about what it is not. It's the difference between escaping from and escaping to. In the former case you're still talking the captors' language; only in the latter case do you have positive terms of your own. The second reason is related to the first and will bring me (finally!) to my next point: Eliot has spent half and more of his essay presenting a case against the Romantics--against emotion and personality--rather than making a case of his own.
Eliot's own case is not about poetic provenance but about poetic process--which is really more interesting, because it's analyzable, actionable, learnable. Theoretically, that is. With all of tradition thrumming in your bones and staring you in the face it might be hard to analyze, act, learn, or do anything other than what Eliot says you should do--give up your personality--and toss your pen along with it. If you manage not to despair, though, it might be useful to know that, according to Eliot, writing poetry is a matter of synthesis and integration; of "combination," "fusion," "transmutation," "concentration." The poet's mind is a kind of crucible--
a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
--and the composition of poetry a kind of alchemy. I'm just happening to use a medieval model, it's what occurred to me, but Eliot's choice of analogy is taken from modern chemistry: the poet's mind is the filament of platinum catalyzing the chemical transformation of oxygen and sulphur dioxide into sulphuric acid. Poetry as acid--I don't know whether I love it or hate it! The poet's mind as a sliver of precious metal is nice though?
Anyway, the rest of what I have to say is just the oft-said, that Eliot's essay heavily influenced the American New Criticism of the mid century. "To divert interest from the poet to the poetry," Eliot writes, "is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad." The critic's focus should be on the poem, not the poet. Furthermore, in my understanding of New Criticism--which I expect will be developed further when I read The Well Wrought Urn--some of its key words were paradox, irony, balance; the poem was conceptualized as an artifact which resolved the first by the use of the second to achieve the third (to be super schematic about it). I saw something of this adumbrated in Eliot's brief analysis of a passage from The Revenger's Tragedy:
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.
I don't know what Eliot means by "a new art emotion" here, nor do I quite understand the distinction he makes elsewhere in the essay between "emotions" and "feelings." I do though very much like his idea of tradition--unfashionable though I believe it is to admit such a thing--and have pressed the point of his indebtedness to the Romantics--which I understand everyone does now. So that balances me out, between fashion and unfashion? In any case, and in conclusion, I feel the need to apologize for this behemoth of a post. Hopefully I'll not write one so long again!