Abyss Notes for T.S. Eliot's</P> Tradition and the Individual Talent(1919)

E.K. Sparks
Dept of English
Clemson U
Fall 1998

Abyss Notes for ReadingT.S. Eliot's
"Tradition and the Individual Talent"(1919)

The title announces the two main parts of the essay: Part I is about"tradition": Part II is about "the individual talent." Which is Eliot more in favor of?

PART I

Eliot begins his essay with an opposition between criticism and creativity which Matthew Arnold had made famous in"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." In that essay, Arnold had called for a new spirit of critical thinking to replace the emotional immaturity of the Romantics. When Eliot says that"criticism is as inevitable as breathing" which side of the Classic/Romantic debate is he taking?

What is Eliot attacking when he talks about the"prejudice" for looking at a"poet's difference from his predecessors"? What is his attitude towards emulation, learning from the masters? What side would he be on the 18thC Ancients vs. Moderns debate?

"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." Two important ideas here:

1) the idea of"tradition" as a kind of organic entity in itself-- as if literature existed in, even created its own world;

2) the idea that the literature of the present can change (our perception) of the literature of the past. How does this work? Can you think of any contemporary work of literature you have read which changed how you saw an earlier work? This also works for film. Can you think of an example of a parody film which fundamentally changes the way you look at the original? If you know anything about Eliot's poetry, can you see this process working in, say,"Prufrock" or The Waste Land?

Notice how in the first section, the poet subordinates himself ( no her selves here) to tradition-- the poet's mind is subordinated to"the mind of Europe." (What does the mind of Europe contain?) In the second section, the poet is also subordinated, this time to the peculiarly disinterested, aesthetic emotions of art. NB: Eliot is using"aesthetic" here in a Kantian sense: referring to the emotion experienced when contemplating art as a special category. The aesthetic sense is divorced both from concerns of immediate utility and from all personal emotions. For Kant, we know something is art because it has no other purpose or use than to be beautiful. This led eventually to the art-for-art's sake movement in the late 19thC, of which Eliot is a partial, though unadmitted heir.

PART II

Poetry rather than the poet. What kind of shift in critical concerns (in Abrams's terms: mimetic, rhetorical, expressive, objective) is Eliot signaling here?

Does the catalyst image really work--logically? How is it anti-romantic?

No one has definitively sorted out"emotions" vs."feelings." In general, in Eliot, emotions are associated with experiences/events in one's personal life-- things with a plot that happened to one. Emotions have a cause and effect component and some sense of structure (the" objective correlative" which Eliot mentions in his Hamlet essay is a plot structure corresponding to an emotion). Feelings, on the other hand, are vaguer, more floating impressions and images that are somehow less personal and more aesthetic.

"How completely any semi-ethical criterion of sublimity misses the mark" -- here Eliot is complaining about ideas that some particular subject-matter is intrinsically more poetical, that somehow poems about clouds are better than poems about mud puddles.

"But of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape these things" -- for me, the most interesting sentence in the essay. Remember this is the man who wrote"Prufrock." What (Tom) cat comes scratching out of the bag here?