Initial impressions: Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

“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.”

T.S Eliot was a Boston Brahmin, a name given to the erudite city dwellers of Boston, believed to be descendants of the early English settlers. The origins of the term ‘Brahmin’ (evoked curiosity given his inclination to Eastern philosophy) apparently had  little to do with the system but rather a fancy name coined for the elitist purist faction of the city, albeit inspired.  

A considerable number of literary insiders consider Eliot the most important literary critic of the 19^th century and I think this played an enormous role in substantiating his identity as a prominent poet and thinker of the era as well. Eliot is widely acknowledged to have been one of the foremost to weed out the persona of the artist from that of his art. His oft quoted and widely read essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ published in 1919 does lay out the role of the writer in the making of his work and ascertains his place in history as one that both draws from and adds to the past. 

I’m personally drawn to the first part of the essay where Eliot comments on the historical sense of an artist,

“the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order”

The art of abiding by/ procuring such historical sense is what I believe must drive writers, readers, critics alike these days. I’m reminded of Jeyamohan’s criticism on his predecessors’ fixation on European historicism as well as his stance against the uniform template used by a vast majority of contemporary Tamil poets, averse to one’s own historical background, spinning poetic pretension and little else. In the second part of the essay, Eliot lays out the role of the “detached” writer in the making of his work and ascertains his place in history as one that both draws from and adds to the past. Eliot sums it up best with 

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living”

Tradition and the Individual Talent