Importance of ‘Tradition’ in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’
“The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
– T.S. Eliot, Tradition and The Individual Talent
According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Tradition means a belief, principle, or a way of acting which people in a particular society or a group have followed for a long time. Merriam Webster-Dictionary describes ‘Tradition’ as ‘inherited, established or a customary pattern of thought, action or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)’. T.S. Eliot, in his essay, offered his own interpretation of ‘Tradition’, by emphasizing the importance of history for writing and understanding poetry, and argued that poetry should be essentially impersonal, that is, separate and distinct from the personality of the writer. Present activities of an individual are constantly shaped and formed by the past. Severing from the Romantics, he interpreted tradition to be related to a reassuring science of archaeology along with revering the dead poets and artists. Drawing from his predecessors, he argued that the importance of tradition will help a poet to develop a consciousness of the past which he must continue to develop throughout his career.
Unlike the renowned idea, in which a poet’s work was seen as independent, Eliot remedied that a novel work of art, asserts the immortality of the dead poets, most vigorously. This idea shouldn’t be misinterpreted with simply passing down of frameworks with ‘blind and timid adherence’, rather, inclined to the idea of novelty. Being a complex ideology, tradition was not simply inherited but was obtained with great labor, which not only included the historical sense of the pastness of the past but also of the present. As exemplified in the essay, this historical sense compelled a man to not only write of his own generation, but with a holistic feeling of Europe, accompanied by the literature of his own country as well (the sense of timeless and temporal together). Although he was perfectly aware of Mathew Arnold’s notion of historical criticism and therefore distanced himself from the Arnoldian critical stance by identifying his approach to literary appreciation as a principle of aesthetics. A poet, when forming his work, should be extremely sensitive to these principles as the present new toil of his will be continuously judged and compared by the past. This judgement was interpreted as a measured comparison between the old and new productions, with its ‘fitting in’ being a test of its value. Eliot pointedly stated that the poet shall never proclaim his work as an improvement, by ignoring the traditional writers like Shakespeare or Homer. Ronald L. Baker correctly pointed out, “the notions which constitute a tradition are not ideas merely, but principles of order. They are schemes which direct the production of work.” The Romantics believed in a very personal response to the world, but for Eliot, a poet should do away with the idea of personal, as tradition allows one to ‘depersonalize’. Acting as a catalyst, the poet should be like a shred of Platinum, which remained unchanged after a chemical reaction between Oxygen and Sulphur dioxide. Aiden Nichols argued that Eliot’s real enemy is not individuality, rather a sentimental and an anti-traditional version of what individuality involves. This seems clear from the effect that the greatness of the poetry does not flow from the greatness of the emotion which produced it, but from a fusion of elements and meanings drawn from tradition in the present of the poets’ own time.
The poet’s mind should act as a receptacle for storing feelings, phrases, and images so that all the particles can be united so that a formation of a new compound can take place. ‘Sublimity’ depends upon the intensity of the artistic process or on the pressure under which the fusion took place. A work should be made renowned by the intensity of the poetic process and not by mere intensity of the components. For instance, the episode of ‘Paolo and Francesca da Rimini’, painted by Dante Gabrielle Rosetti, produced a definite emotion, but has no more intensity than Canto XXVI, The Voyage of Ulysses, which had least to do with emotion. He simultaneously exemplified great works like the murder of Agamemnon and the agony of Othello, which had a transmutation of emotion, giving an artistic effect closer to a ‘possible original’. A poet adhering to all the principles of tradition and poetry may be considered merely as a medium in which impressions and experiences combine in a particular and an unexpected way. Differing from the poet’s personally experienced emotions, which might be crude and simple, his poetry should contain emotions that will be a bit more complex and refined. This should not also be confused with finding new emotions altogether as it will lead to eccentricity. He should use ordinary emotions to express feelings which are not in the actual emotions at all.
Not conforming with the definition that Wordsworth gave about poetry, as being, ‘emotions recollected in tranquility’, Eliot argued that poetry was only a concentration of various experiences. This variety is neither conscious nor deliberate. Concurrently, he described a poetic process also not being a complete passive one, leaving the final answer to a ‘good poet’s consciousness’. By bifurcating the essay into three consequent parts, Eliot very eloquently substantiated the ideas of tradition, relating it to the idea of a worthy poet. In Following Tradition, Bronner rightly pointed out that one problem that followed the understanding of tradition was its plethora of multiple meanings and conceptual softness, which came from the influence of social scientific theory on contemporary central studies. This statement stands as a primary reason for Eliot elaborating in his essay, the importance of ‘tradition’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Nichols, Aidan. “T. S. Eliot and Yves Congar on the Nature of Tradition.” Angelicum, vol. 61, no. 3, 1984, pp. 473–485. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44615730. Accessed 28 Oct. 2020.
- Baker, Ronald L. “Tradition and The Individual Talent in Folklore and Literature.” Western Folklore, vol. 59, no. 2, 2000, pp. 105–114. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1500155. Accessed 28 Oct. 2020.
- T. S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919.