Tag Archives: T.S. Eliot

ESSAY: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot

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Tradition and the Individual Talent: An EssayTradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay by T.S. Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Read for free at the Poetry Foundation

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While this is a controversial essay and I don’t accept it wholesale, myself, I would wholeheartedly recommend it as required reading for poets (and other artists.) What is Eliot’s controversial thesis? It’s that poetry should be less about the poet. That broad and imprecise statement can be clarified by considering two ways in which Eliot would make poetry less about the poet. First, Eliot proposes that poets should be in tune to the historic evolution of their art and — importantly — should not be so eager to break the chain with the past masters. He’s not saying a poet needs to be a literary historian, but rather that one be well-read in the poetry of the past. Second, Eliot advocates that a poet avoid packing one’s poetry with one’s personality, and – instead – let one’s personality dissolve away through the act of creation.

A quote from the essay may help to clarify — Eliot says, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

One can imagine the accusations of pretension and dogmatism that Eliot received in 1919 from the mass of poets who were moving full speed ahead into poetry that was suffused with autobiography, was avant-garde, and which was free of meter, rhyme and other compositional elements that had once been seen as the defining characteristics of poetry.

I don’t see this essay as being the map to our new home, but rather as the catalyst of a conversation that could move us to a more preferable intermediary location. I have, too often, picked up a collection by a young poet that was entirely autobiographical and (also, too often) of the “everybody hates me, nobody loves me, I think I’ll go eat worms” variety of wallowing in personal feelings. And I always think, when I want to read something depressing, I’ll read something from someone who has lived tragedy — e.g. a Rwandan refugee, not something from a twenty-four-year-old MFA student at some Ivy League school.

So, yeah, maybe we could use more connection to the past and a bit less autobiographical poetry from people who haven’t lived a novel-shaped life.

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POEM: Memories in the Midnight Deeps

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"Indefinite Divisibility" (1942) by Yves Tanguy

“Indefinite Divisibility” (1942) by Yves Tanguy

 

T.S. Eliot said,

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium

 

I know–exactly–what he means

Tragedy lurks in the midnight deeps

It hides, free from consciousness

It hides, outside memory

A catastrophic tick that has no echo

Fleeting images and emotional residue

all amble home in the morning

 

 

THE CLASSICS: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

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The Waste Land (Illustrated Edition)The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon page

It’s for good reason that this is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. Eliot’s vivid verse paints a bleak landscape in language of beauty not seen in the poem’s imagery. It will come as no surprise that this work was penned during a dark time in the poet’s life, but it wasn’t just Eliot’s personal dark hour; for many, the wounds of World War I hadn’t yet scarred over.

This poem is divided into five sections, each with an artful title. The five sections of The Waste Land are: “The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, “The Fire Sermon”, “Death by Water”, and “What the Thunder Said.” Some consider The Waste Land to be a collection of five poems, but there is both language and theme that connects the various parts. For example, the following verse is contained in both the first and third chapter:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog…

The poem contains many complex references to Arthurian legends and to a broad swath of literary canon. You can learn about that from individuals more erudite than I. I will suggest a simpler theme, and that is death—not just death, but death as an eraser of legacies and influence. Eliot refers to bone almost as much as he does death, and by the time one’s body is reduced to bones one’s influence on the land of the living is minimal—even for giants among men. When he’s not speaking of bones, he’s speaking of death of masses, also a form of anonymous death.

I will pick a few lines from each of the five sections to illustrate my point.



From “The Burial of the Dead”:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn
A crowd flowed over the London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many



From “A Game of Chess”:
I think we are in rat’s alley
Where the dead men lost their bones



From “The Fire Sermon”:
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.



From “Death by Water”:
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers



From “What the Thunder Said”:
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is long dead
We who were living are now dying
With little patience



I’m not saying that Eliot’s views on death and dying are great from a philosophical or psychological perspective—on the contrary, but as a work of poetry these words should be read by all.

 

Neither the version linked to in GoodReads nor on Amazon is the version I read. As far as I could tell by way of a hasty search, the Kindle edition I read no longer exists.

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