Tradition and the Individual Talent

“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 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.”

This seems, at first, a paradox: Individuality emerges from a writer when they are immersed in tradition. Paradox illuminates the contrast with how past poets may have viewed tradition and makes it clear that utilizing the material of those who came before is not a crutch for the poet but a mark of maturity.

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. […] [N]ovelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”

The words “tradition” and “novelty” in this context allude to Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets who viewed novelty as part of personality and tradition as repetition. Eliot uses their words to create a new definition and, in the process, models the layering of history he proposes in the essay.

“[Tradition] involves […] the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

Eliot uses parallelism to deepen a concept. The words “pastness,” “past,” and “presence” replace each other as objects of a preposition, and with each phrase, the idea of perception grows from something bound by time into timelessness.

“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.”

This is a Modernist understanding of what art and the artist mean. Instead of the artist being judged by his personality or in isolation, the artist is now defined by the ways that he responds to the past and by the values of the artists that came before. However, because we can only know what’s past, the assessment of a poet or poem will shift as new poetry is made.

“The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route.”

This section demonstrates Eliot’s view of art and the artist. Art never improves yet is never quite the same, and the artist performs the feat of knowing a changing mind, both that of a culture and himself, and abandoning nothing.

“What happens is a continual surrender of [the poet] 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.”

Individuality surrenders to tradition for the artist to expand his or her expression of emotion and ideas. This surrender mirrors the relationship of the poet to poetry, a surrender of the poet’s experiences, emotions, and feelings, so they might form new combinations in the poem.

“Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”

Criticism and appreciation form a parallel with poet and poetry. By inserting “but” between the final pair, Eliot makes a new and elegant differentiation between poets and their poems. This also serves as the transition between the idea of criticism and tradition into the nature of poetry and the poet.

“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 very varied feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.”

This quote defines the role of the poet in relationship with poetry. The poet is not to transmit his or her personality into the poem but, through the process of depersonalization, the elements in their creative mind can enter into new patterns and forms.

“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.”

Eliot brings together the allusions to Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” and the language of science to explain the process of poetic creation. He practices this varied combination as well, bringing together many varied sentences and clauses into a coherent whole.

“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 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.”

This passage, using new allusions to add layers of examples, argues that the event the poet records in a poem does not replicate the event itself. Just as a poet’s use of the tools from dead poets is transformed through their use of them in a new context, the event, too, has been fused with other images and emotions to become something new.

“The point of view which I am struggling to 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.”

This is one of the primary paradoxes of the essay: the poet has a medium, not a personality, by which his poem is brought into being. Through the interplay of “medium” and “personality” Eliot whittles down his intended meaning and creates a sense of unity while holding on to the difference between personality and medium as it pertains to the poet.

“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the 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.”

These lines untangle the paradoxical relationship of the poet to emotions as Eliot views them. Just as Eliot believes that the past is present and transformed by the present, the poet’s emotions carry that same quality in their journey to and through the poem.

“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.”

In the final sentence of Part 2, Eliot reiterates his definition of poetry. He creates two complex compound clauses parallel to one another to show with clarity what shifts from one definition to the other while, through the repetition of the parallel elements, giving it an orderly, lyrical appearance.