Traditional and Individual Talent

 “TRADITION AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT”

T.s.Eliot’s “tradition and individual talent” was published in 1919 in the egoist – the times literary supplement. Later, the essay was published in the sacred wood: essays on poetry and criticism in 1920/2. This essay is described by David lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in English of the 20th century. The essay is divided into three main sections:

 (1) The first gives us Eliot’s concept of tradition.

(2) The second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry.

(3) The third part concludes the debate by saying that the poet’s sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.

(Part-1)

·        IN ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM “TRADITION” IS USED AS A PHRASE OF CENSURE:-

In English literature and criticism we rarely come across passages illustrative of the right use due emphasis on the term “tradition”, from time to time we apply the word in expressing our grief for its absence. We cannot make a reference to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we use the adjective in saying that the poetry of so and so is “tradition” or even “too traditional”. The word appears rarely and when it does appear, it is used as a phrase of censure.

In English criticism, according to Eliot, we have a deplorable lack of that critical insight which views a particular literary work or a writer in the context of a wider literary tradition. The English literary critic does not give due weight and consideration to tradition in evaluating the writers of the past and in appreciating the poets of the present. He uses “tradition” in a derogatory sense.

·         CRITICISM IS INDISPENSABLE FOR CREATIVE ACTIVITY:-

The critical activity paves the way for, sustains and guides the creative activity. Just as the creative genius of each nation possesses some distinguishing. Traits, certain aptitudes and inclinations, being the expression of that nation’s life: in the same way each nation, each race has certain distinguishing habits of mind reflected in critical activity. And just as it is not easy for a nation to acquire a self-awareness of the defects and limitations of its creative habits of mind, in the same way it is difficult for a nation to cultivate a consciousness of the shortcomings of its critical habits of mind. The English nation in Eliot’s opinion suffers from a similar unawareness of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical genius. The English are familiar with the critical writing in French often leads an Englishman to believe that the French people are more critical, and consequently less spontaneous. Eliot strives to dispel this fallacy by emphasising the importance of criticism which, according to him, is as indispensable to creative activity as breathing is to life. Criticism expresses our responses to a particular work of art: it expresses the feelings and emotions and intellectual reaction of a reader in relation to the book he reads.  

·        THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADITION TO INDIVIDUAL TALENT:-

Eliot says that the Englishmen have a tendency to insist, when they praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects of his work they try to find out what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of that man. They try to find out the difference of the port with his contemporaries and predecessors, especially with his immediate predecessors. They try to find something that can be separated in order to be enjoyed. But if we study the poet without bias or prejudice, we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead ports, his ancestors, assert their immortality forcefully and vigorously. We find the dead notes in the present poets not in their impressionable period of adolescence. But in the period of their full maturity. According to Eliot tradition and individual talent go together.

·        “TRADITION” DEFINED:-

Tradition is not the handling down or following the ways of the ancients blindly. It cannot be inherited. It can only be obtained with great labour. It involves a historical sense. Which enables a poet to perceive not only the pastness of the past but of its presentness . A creative artist, though he lives in a particular milieu, does not work merely with his own generation in view.

He does not take his own age, or the literature of that period only as a separate identity. But acts with the conviction that in general the whole literature of the continent from the classical age of the Greeks onwards and in particular the literature of his own country. Is to be taken as a harmonious whole. His own creative efforts are not    apart from it. But a part of it.

·         THE CLOSE RELATIONSHIP AND INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE PAST AND PRESENT:-

No poet or artist of any kind has his full meaning and significance alone. His importance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his kinship with the poets and artists of the past generations, you cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the poets and writers of the past. This, to Eliot, is a principle of aesthetic, and not merely of historical criticism. The necessity for the individual talent to conform to the tradition is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The existing order is complete 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; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order in the form of European of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present it directed by the past.”

·         THE RELATIONSHIP OF A POET’S WORK TO THE GREAT WORKS OF THE PAST:-

The poet, who understands the presentness of the past, also understands his responsibilities and difficulties as an artist. Such an artist will fully realise that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. In saying that an artist is finally to be judged by the standards of the past. Eliot does not imply that he is to be pronounced better or worse than the previous poets or that the standards prescribed by the previous critics are to be applied in judging their works.

·         LITERATURE AS A CONTINUITY:-

Eliot points out a significant difference between the past and the present. The difference is that “the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show” Eliot covers the possible objection that his doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition and that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. He says that there is a distinction between knowledge and pedantry. “Some can absorb knowledge; the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career”. He believes that it is the awareness of tradition that sharpens the sensibility. Which has a vital part to play in the process of poetic creation.

(Part-2)

He starts the second part of his essay with: “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”.

The artist or the poet adopts the process of depersonalization, which is “a continual surrender of himself 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,” there still remain to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to sense of tradition.

·        THE PROCESS OF DEPERSONALISATION :-

Eliot explains this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition by comparing it to a chemical process – the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. The analogy is that of the catalyst. He sys: “when the two gases previously mentioned (oxygen and sulphur dioxide) are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum they form sulphurous if the platinum is present: nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum. And the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, 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.

·         EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS:-

The elements of the experience of the poet are of two kinds-emotions and feelings. They are the element which entering the presence of the poet’s mind and acting as a catalyst, go to the making of a work of art, the final effect produced by a work of art may be formed out of several emotions into one, it may be formed out of a singly emotion or out of the feeling invoked in the poet by various words and images. It is also possible that it may be composed of feeling alone, without using any emotions. Thus the poet’s mind is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feeling, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

“……as one of those

Who o’er Verona’s champion try their speed

For the green mantle; and of them he seems,

Not he who loses, but who gains the prize.”

It is in this image, according to Eliot, that Dante gives the feeling attached to it. It cannot be said that the poet arrived at it all of a sudden. No can be regarded as simply developing out of the preceding lines. This “feeling” remained in suspension in Dante’s mind till the preceding complex details of the canto prepared an apt combination for this feeling to appear.

·         THE INTENSITY OF THE ARTISTIC PROCESS:-

Eliot believes that the greatness of a poem does not depend on the greatness or the intensity of the emotions but on the intensity of the artistic process e.g. in 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 the event is always absolute”, “the ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly perhaps because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.”

Eliot says 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 which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”

(PART – 3)

In the last section of “tradition and the individual talent” Eliot says that the poet’s sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things. He tries to divert the interest from the poet to the poetry for it would lead to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good or bad. He says that “very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. 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” a constant and continual awareness of tradition is very necessary for the port.

·         ELIOT AND NEW CRITICISM:-

Eliot inspired and informed the movement of new criticism. This is somewhat ironic, since he later criticised their excruciatingly detailed analysis of texts. Yet, he does share with them the same focus on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of poetry, rather than on its ideological content. The new critics resemble Eliot in their close analysis of particular passages and poems.

·         CRITICISM OF ELIOT :-

Eliot’s theory of literary tradition has been criticised for its limited definition of what constitutes the canon of that tradition. He assumes the authority to choose what represents great poetry, and his choices have been criticised on several fronts, for examples, Harold bloom disagrees with Eliot’s condescension of romantic poetry, which, in the metaphysical poets (1921) he criticised for its “dissociation of sensibility.” Moreover, many believe Eliot’s discussion of the literary tradition as the “mind of Europe '' reeks of euro-centrism. He does not account for a non-masculine tradition. As such, his notion of tradition stands at odds with feminist, postcolonial and minority theories. Kenyan author James Ngugi advocated a commitment to nation works. Which speaks to one’s own culture, as compared to deferring to an arbitrary notion of literary excellence. As such, he implicitly attacks Eliot’s subjective criterion in choosing an elite body of literary works. Post-colonial critic chinua achebe also challenges Eliot, since he argues against deferring to those writers, including  Conrad, who have been deemed great, but only represent a specific cultural perspective.

Harold Bloom presents a conception of tradition that differs from that of Eliot. Whereas Eliot believes that the great poet is faithful to his predecessors and evolves in a concordant manner, Bloom envisions the “strong port”to engage in a much more aggressive and tumultuous rebellion against tradition.

In 1964, his last year, Eliot published in a reprint of the use of poetry and use of criticism, a series of lectures he gave at Harvard university in 1932 and 1933, a new preface in which he called “tradition and the individual talent” the most juvenile of his essays.