In his exceptional essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', Eliot writes:
‘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.’
Eliot's enemy is the Romantic view of poetry as self-expression: as the expression of a particular personality. Eliot the modernist say exactly the opposite: that truly great art is interested in dissolving personalities and immersion in the tradition. The poet must engage in an act of self-immolation before the tradition and the work - the tradition not just as the voice of the past in the past but tradition as the 'present moment of the past'. He must offer himself to the voice of the tradition and lose his own; but then, he will find he has his own back.
What is interesting is that this is a kind of a 'martyrdom of the poet'; or at least, a self-sacrifice of the poet to the greater voice of the tradition.
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Elliot seems to be trying to make art work like Kant's categorical imperative where tradition stands in for reason? But what is this mythical tradition to which every thinking poet has access?
Eliot's tradition = 'the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer', apparently. But Eliot would say that it's not so very mythical or mystical, I think. He says that it 'cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.'
I wonder, Michael, if you are suggesting that this break with Romanticism (and its focus on the individual, emotion, and originality) is entirely good? Because Tradition and the Individual Talent (in a roundabout way) inspired the intentional fallacy and New Criticism, and I wouldn't say that the death of the author is a completely positive development.
P.S. I think the martyrdom idea is there and is very explicit in the essay. Eliot on the artist at work:
"What happens 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."
Right, I shall go back to work. I may have accidentally posted this twice, by the way.
Thanks BeccaK. I am suggesting that the break with Romanticism was good! I think the egotism of that period was disastrous. But equally, the submergence of the individual is problematic... I think it would be hard to blame Eliot for the Death of the Author (though I do think the intentional fallacy was a great piece of work and we should apply it more often in our Bible study, actually...)
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