11 O I Criticism in the twentieth century
Eliot and the idea of tradition I 111
The impulse behind Eliot's argument is detectable in those words 'ideal order'. They
reflect his sense of what in his essay 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth' (1923) he calls 'the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history'. To view
present anarchy in the light of an ordered past might make it appear less anarchic. But
that past is ordered only from our present perspective, and so the order was never actual
but always only ideal. The statement in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that 'this
essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism' sounds like a covert
admission that 'the historical sense' cannot provide a basis in actuality for order. By
declining to go beyond, even as it calls attention to, that frontier, the essay presents an
intriguingly unresolved tension between reality and ideality.
Impersonality-the closet Romantic
The second part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' shifts from tradition and the
historical sense to the individual practising poet. The motive evidently underlying that
shift-somehow to set the poetic operation, as well as the finished work, in a context
beyond the partial lived truth-leads to a rhetorical sleight of hand, as Maud Ellmann
demonstrates in her book The Poetics ofImpersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. She argues
that Eliot's 'notion of impersonality is ... equivocal', and that his conception of 'a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality . . . ennobles rather than
degrades the poet' through its 'saintly renunciation of the self': 'the artist universalises
his identity at the very moment that he seems to be negated'. The theory of imperson-
ality does not deny subjectivism, but 'sets out to put the author in his place, and to
liberate the poem from his narcissism'. Thus the second part of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' frequently strays into psychological terminology in spite of itself. It
invites inspection of all that it would ward off, a prurience encouraged by the evasive
statement that 'only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to
want to escape from these things'. And the 'scientific', seemingly objective chemical
analogy for the creative process (a 'catalyst' 'transforms' and 'fuses' into a new whole the
'elements', the 'emotions and feelings', that enter its presence), whose purpose is to
denigrate the work of art as an expressive medium, reads today like a smoke-screen.
Ellmann writes that Eliot 'claims to be degrading authors into passive vehicles in which
"emotions and feelings" may combine at will .... However, feelings presuppose a feeler.
Eliot is attacking expressivism with its own weapons.'
Thus, although Eliot no doubt wanted to achieve the authority of an 'objective'
discourse with his theory of impersonality, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' betrays
intense personal motivation. The same anxiety about inner, subconscious impulses
evidently prompted Eliot to enlist, like other Modernists, under the banner of 'Classi-
cism' (supposed to signify reason, order, objectivity) against 'Romanticism' (signifying
T. S.
the irrational, the subjective). The deployment of these terms now comes across as
principally strategic and rhetorical, a way for Eliot to establish a break with the past
and to disguise from his readers, even perhaps from himself, the springs of his own
poetry. The rhetoric worked for many years, until C. K. Stead firmly established the
Romantic and post-Romantic inheritance of Eliot's poetry, with its 'dark embryo' of
pre-conscious creation and its echo chamber of Romantic and nineteenth-century
poetry. 3 Moreover, Eliot's notion of impersonality owes more to important tendencies
in Romantic poetics than he lets on. The oft-quoted sentence from 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent'-'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emo-
tion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality'-has affin-
ities with, though is less humorously magnanimous than, Keats's equally famous idea of
'the chamelion poet': 'the poetical Character ... is not itself-it has no self-it is every
thing and nothing-It has no character .... A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in
existence; because he has no Identity-he is continually in for-and filling some other
Body.' 4 And recent studies have convincingly argued that in many respects Eliot's
criticism is continuous with Romantic thought. Significantly, such arguments have
been accompanied by a general revision of literary history that sees Modernism not as
a break with, but on the contrary an extension of, Romanticism.
Eliot's idea of a specifically English literary tradition also signifies a resistance to all
those impulses in himself that he regarded as 'romantic': the inchoate, the subconscious,
the ungovernable. Its most succinct formulation, often repeated if not parroted, is in the
essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921). Again, the emphasis is on unity and wholeness,
now given a historically specific context: 'In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in' between thought and feeling: Tennyson and Browning, we are told, 'are
poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a
rose', whereas 'a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility'. In the
mind of a poet 'perfectly equipped for its work', disparate 'experiences are always form-
ing new wholes'. Here unity of being, where intellect and emotion are at one, is imagined
as participating in a grand temporal narrative. This way of thinking was generally
accepted in the Anglo-American academy until well into the 1950s, if not beyond, and
was accompanied by suitable historical accounts of the 'tradition'. Variations were
produced proffering alternative dates and eras for the advent of this supposed 'dissoci-
ation', but today we can see that they all reflect that Modernist sense of cultural and
social disintegration and a yearning for pre-lapsarian utopias of integrated being. More-
over, such yearning again signifies a continuity with Romanticism. As Edward
Lobb argues in his book T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition, the idea of a
dissociation of sensibility is 'the story of Eden applied to the secular history of literature',
and as such is a 'literary myth [that] was first put forward by the Romantics'. Thus,
'Eliot's view of literary history is ... basically Romantic in its nostalgia for a lost golden
age.'