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Electronic Reserve Reading: Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) T. S. Eliot In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ that adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology. |
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Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. 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. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.
No poet, no artist
of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation
is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You
cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison,
among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not Whoever has approved
this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will
not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present
as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is
aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. Precisely, and
they are that which we know. I am alive to a
usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier
of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous
amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal
to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that
much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however,
we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not
encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is
not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful
shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious
modes of publicity. Some can absorb
knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more
essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British
Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or
procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to
develop this consciousness throughout his career. 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. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I therefore invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. Honest criticism
and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the
poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics
and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the
names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge
but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find
it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the
poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of
poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written.
The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation
of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind
of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely
in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more
interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being
a more finely perfected medium in which special, or varied, feelings
are at liberty to enter into new combinations. The analogy was
that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed
in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid.
This combination takes place only ifthe platinum is present; nevertheless
the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum
itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged.
The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively
operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect
the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind
digest and transmute the passions which are its material. The experience,
you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming
catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work
of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind
from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion,
or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for
the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to
compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct
use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto
XV of the Inferno (Brunette Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident
in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work
of an, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain'
gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came"
which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably
in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived
for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact 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. If you compare
several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great
is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any
semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For
it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions,
the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure,
so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode
of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity
of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in
the supposed ex- perience it may give the impression of. It is not more
intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which
has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible
in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon,
or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effecr apparently closer
to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon,
the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator;
in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference
between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which
is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the
voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements.
The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular
to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly perhaps
because of its reputation, served to bring together. This attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light--or darkness--of these observations:
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 towards
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. It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it dis- covers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but the use of ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility"" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, andconscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." 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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. III (I've omitted a
greek quote here --trans.: "The Mind may be too divine, and therefore
unaffected"--because I can't find the asci table in this program.) |