A Hundred Years of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Sometime during the early days of September, 1919, T. S. Eliot—just thirty years old and working as a clerk in the foreign-exchange division of Lloyds Bank in London—sat down and wrote his manifesto as a poet and critic, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Its effects were hardly immediate. The essay appeared in the September and December, 1919, issues of The Egoist, the London-based little magazine for which Eliot had been serving as an assistant editor since June, 1917. These would turn out to be the last issues that the magazine would publish. A “Notice to Readers” in the December issue announced a hiatus for 1920; the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver wanted to focus her energies on publishing books. That pause would prove to be a full stop. Not many could have been disappointed at the announcement: The Egoist, by its end, boasted a print run of just four hundred, and a mere forty-five subscribers. In “Paradise Lost,” Milton argued for the sufficiency of a “fit audience . . . though few”—but there are limits.

Though “Tradition” was initially seen only by a coterie audience, it is Eliot’s most important essay—and arguably, the most influential English-language literary essay of the twentieth century. From that modest début, its reach has grown exponentially. Within a year, the piece was included in Eliot’s first critical collection, “The Sacred Wood,” published in November, 1920. It subsequently appeared in the three other volumes assembled by Eliot, including “Selected Essays,” which itself went through three different editions. In that collection, “Tradition” has the pole position.

And it wasn’t the first choice of Eliot alone. “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” that canon-creating textbook par excellence, has included the essay in every one of its ten editions, dating back to 1962; in that first edition, Eliot is the only twentieth-century poet whose criticism is represented. “Tradition” is further reproduced in all nine editions of Norton’s American-literature anthology (as an American expatriate, Eliot is hard on taxonomies, and both the British and the Americans tend to claim him) and many other literature textbooks. The essay has been an important part of the literature survey curriculum for more than half a century. “Tradition” is the criticism that critics read when they’re figuring out that they want to be critics. In the literature and literary criticism of the twentieth century, it’s simply unavoidable.

In 1919, Eliot could boast only a thin volume of poems and a handful of essays and reviews, but he had confidence to spare. In a letter sent to his mother, back in St. Louis, in March of that year—six months, that is, before he published the first essay he would deem worthy of reprinting—he wrote, “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James.” It’s an outlandish claim, even if one allows for the kind of hyperbole to be found in a letter meant to impress one’s parents. (To be fair, he does go on to admit, “All this sounds very conceited. . . . ”) “Tradition” is stamped with the voice of a young man intoxicated with a belief in his own authority; as he wrote in that same letter, “I can have more than enough power to satisfy me.” In “Tradition,” we first see him flex those muscles.

The essay is a challenge to the conventions of early twentieth-century literary criticism. Eliot’s most concise statement of his thesis comes at the start of the December installment: “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” That literary criticism should focus on texts might seem axiomatic; that it ought not pay attention to the author is perhaps less obvious. Eliot is reacting to a wave of criticism in which study of the poet had too often been substituted for study of the poetry—an orientation sometimes known as biographical criticism and which, in the generation following Eliot’s essay, would be dubbed the “biographical fallacy.” In Chapter 2 of “Ulysses,” Stephen Dedalus’s employer, Mr. Deasy, lectures him about frugality: “But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.” Stephen mutters a single word under his breath in response: “Iago.” Stephen is, after his fashion, pushing back against the biographical fallacy. “Shakespeare” didn’t “say” that; rather, it was voiced by perhaps the most monstrous of all his characters. Iago’s statement reflects nothing, necessarily, about Shakespeare’s own values and judgments. As Eliot writes of the poet in general, “emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.” And this applies not just to named literary characters—the “I” that speaks in lyric poetry is also a character, not entirely coincident with the writer who formed that character on the page. “The more perfect the artist,” Eliot insists, “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.” This is the creative license that makes imaginative literature possible. And, in 1919, Eliot thought it to be in jeopardy.

“Tradition” is filled with mannerisms that become familiar across the body of Eliot’s critical writing. For instance, he betrays a particular fondness for the vast generalization and the unsupported assertion—unsupported, that is to say, but for the magisterial tone and sonorous sweep of his prose. Take, for instance, the opening gambit of “Tradition”: “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.” Before the era of big data and text mining, what would evidence for such a claim even look like? By means of that “we” (not the royal “we” so much as the faux-communal “we”), Eliot as much as suggests that this is conventional wisdom—what kind of a pedant would insult our intelligence by proving it? Likewise, two years later, in “The Metaphysical Poets,” he will insist, making a virtue of necessity, “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.” One of the most daring critical pronouncements of Eliot’s career—the assertion that difficulty isn’t an unfortunate artifact but actually the litmus test of advanced writing—is just dropped on the page as if it were too painfully obvious to warrant discussion. The scholar Leonard Diepeveen aptly describes this feature of Eliot’s critical prose: “Though he regularly asserts the need for evidence, Eliot doesn’t often provide it.”

What makes “Tradition” such a durable touchstone? In it, Eliot essentially declares Romanticism dead to rights, insinuating that modernism (without employing that label) is the new king. (His friend, the poet-critic T. E. Hulme, had already performed the autopsy roughly seven years earlier, in his essay “Romanticism and Classicism”—but Hulme was killed in the First World War, and the piece wasn’t published until 1924.) William Wordsworth, in the key text of Romantic poetics, the preface to “Lyrical Ballads,” from 1800, had urged that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.” (Which is nothing if not categorical—unproven and unprovable. Eliot wasn’t the only poet partial to such pronouncements.) In “Tradition,” Eliot explicitly rejects that formula, calling it “inexact”: “it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility.” Rather, Eliot insists, “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.” And then the rim-shot, at which Eliot excelled: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Just as he was inspired by the work of Hulme, Eliot was doubtless jolted by the fiery rhetoric of one young Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (also serialized in The Egoist, in 1914-15). Stephen, with confidence to spare himself, declared, “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” There is good reason to doubt that Joyce, in 1915, took this stance quite as seriously as his autobiographical hero did; but if Stephen’s declaration was meant ironically, Eliot certainly didn’t hear it that way. In his hands, rather, this becomes the “impersonal theory of poetry”: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Wait, what? The success as a poet is measured by the erasure of his personality? Eliot’s suggestion is both outlandish and already, in 1916, a critical commonplace. If Wordsworth promoted self-expression as the quintessence of poetry, his contemporary John Keats, in private correspondence, expressed concerns about what he called “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.” Keats referred to himself as a “camelion Poet”: “the poet has . . . no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.” Keats, in 1818, had already propounded his own “impersonal theory of poetry,” one that Eliot certainly knew.

It’s a convention of poetry treatises to provide a memorable image of the poet and his role. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” (written in 1821 and published posthumously, in 1840), the poet is something like an unconscious medium connecting the spirit and human realms. For Eliot, the poet doesn’t serve as a medium but has a medium: “The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express,” Eliot writes, “but a particular medium . . . and not a personality.” Certainly, Eliot knew how to create a memorable image. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the first of his poems to garner widespread attention, does so from the get-go with the shocking conceit of its opening lines: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table. . . . ” In “Tradition,” his image of the poet is equally outré: “I . . . 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.”

That is the last sentence of the September installment of the essay—a real cliff-hanger, by literary-critical standards. Eliot solves the riddle for us early in the December conclusion: “The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.” That is to say, it’s a catalyst; it creates the conditions under which the two gases combine to form a new compound. (Critics would point out that the resulting compound is not, as Eliot states, sulphurous acid, but sulphur trioxide. But never mind that.) The catalyst, the platinum, isn’t affected by the reaction, nor does any trace of it appear in the new compound—but without it, the reaction does not take place. It is, as Shelley writes of the poet, “the influence which is moved not, but moves.”

So poetry, in Eliot’s description, has nothing to do with self-expression or inspiration or originality, as usually understood; the measure of the poet’s art is the pressure he brings to bear on those raw materials, those chemical precursors. And, in turn, literary criticism, when it’s doing its job properly—for every poetic manifesto is also, none too subtly, a set of instructions for critics—leaves the private life of the poet to one side. Many have pointed out how this is a convenient position for Eliot to adopt, given that he had recently begun work on “The Waste Land”—a poem full of autobiographical detail from which he was anxious to distance himself, including anguished dialogue closely modelled on, if not directly quoted from, his first wife Vivien Haigh-Wood.

In another of Eliot’s descriptions, the mind of the poet is “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.” On this score as well, the essay would seem to be clearing important ground (consciously or not) for “The Waste Land,” a pastiche of quotations and echoes and parodies—a poem that carried footnotes, for heaven’s sake, so nervous was Eliot about being accused of plagiarism. The chemistry-lab metaphor is ostentatiously scientific, or at least pseudo-scientific; Eliot’s science envy is on display as well in his 1923 review of “Ulysses,” in which he writes that Joyce’s contemporary use of classical myth “has the importance of a scientific discovery.” In one of the best-known maxims from the previous generation of art critics, Walter Pater (in another unsupported assertion) had declared that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” In “Tradition,” Eliot closely echoes—the better to reject—Pater’s claim: “in this depersonalisation . . . art may be said to approach the condition of science.”

Eliot’s argument is encapsulated in the duelling poles of his title, which might almost read “Tradition vs. the Individual Talent.” In that fight, Eliot is rooting for what he sees as the underdog, tradition—the foundational essay of modern literary criticism is fundamentally conservative. Eliot is also, quietly, biting the hand that feeds him (and writes his paycheck). The Egoist carried a subtitle, “An Individualist Review”; in its pages, Eliot seeks to put individualism in its place. Louis Menand, in his 1987 book about Eliot, points out the perverse bad manners of such a move, describing Eliot in this period as “critiquing the avant-garde in the leading avant-garde forum of the day . . . provoking those writers on their own ground and as one of their number.”

In the essay’s other most striking image (and claim), Eliot suggests that each work of art is part of a vast trans-historical system, a sort of virtual bookshelf containing “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer”—one that might, at any moment, be rearranged by “the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art.” “The existing order is complete,” Eliot explains, “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.” Which is to suggest, rather counterintuitively, that artistic influence runs both ways across time: the past is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” The author David Lodge makes use of this paradox in his 1984 academic farce “Small World,” whose young academic Persse McGarrigle is writing a Master’s thesis on “The Influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare.” The title is both a joke—part of Lodge’s satire—and not.

Looking back with the hindsight of a hundred years, it’s now possible to see Eliot’s remarks on the reciprocal nature of influence as one of the earliest attempts to formulate what would come to be called “intertextuality”—the notion that to write is always to echo other writing (and thereby to alter that earlier writing by wrestling it into new contexts). Roland Barthes, in his rhapsodic 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” claims that “the text is a tissue of quotations . . . a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” Barthes’s multi-dimensional space sounds for all the world like Eliot’s description of the mind of the poet—but it’s even more purely impersonal than what Eliot had imagined. The space is no longer conceived as existing within the poet, but without. It’s the text itself.

Fifty years after Eliot’s manifesto, French cultural theorists like Barthes and Michel Foucault (in “What Is an Author?” from 1969)—as their titles might suggest—took Eliot’s impersonality theory to the nth degree, planting a post- in front of his modernism and humanism. If, for Eliot, the author was a kind of flesh-and-blood beaker, for the French poststructuralists, the author was purely a fiction, a heuristic device—what Foucault called the “author function.” Meanwhile, fifty years after the death of the author was announced and a century after Eliot’s belated obituary for Romanticism, “Tradition” still pulses with energy and life, what the poststructuralists would have called jouissance. Whether the influence is direct or indirect—whether a given literary essay has been influenced by Eliot’s critical brio, or by one who has been influenced by it—literary criticism today everywhere bears his impress.

Even more directly, Eliot the schoolmaster continues to influence students of literature. The pedagogical strategy of “close reading” that evolved in Eliot’s wake, wherein students are taught to focus exclusively on the words on the page—and taught that the “I” of “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is not Wordsworth but the poem’s speaker, a literary character—these are the starting points of every consequential contemporary literary-critical argument. The kind of close reading for which Eliot was arguing in 1919 remains the foundation of literary criticism in 2019—even if critics now think of it as a starting point, not a terminus. Thus, as W. H. Auden wrote about the legacy of W. B. Yeats, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

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