There is a story of President Allende telling the novelist Graham Greene that his country, Chile, 'had no tradition of Army coups'. Greene replied with a story about Stowe- the English Public School set up in 1923. One day on the noticeboard, the following proclamation appeared 'from henceforth the tradition of the School will be...'.
Clearly, at least in the idiomatic English of the period, the word 'tradition' meant some custom or usage which must be treated as venerable, or even of hoary antiquity, even if it had just been invented.
In 1919, T.S Eliot in his essay 'Tradition & Individual Talent' wrote-
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.
Greene's father was the headmaster of an English Public School. I suppose that is why he himself was aware that 'traditions' could be very newfangled indeed. Moreover, a Public School, or a Regiment, or a Drinking Club, without hoary rituals and traditions would ring of but pinchbeck metal. People might think it was some ghastly American fad- like showering everyday or going to the dentist.
We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.”
Did people say that? Perhaps to an American. After all, England was only pretending to have kept up all sorts of traditions which, truth be told, were of pretty recent invention.
Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.
In an anthology of poetry, a poem with wide currency but no known author might be described as 'traditional' except, for the Georgians, that really wouldn't do. You'd have to work hard at turning it into dialect or faking some sort of provenance for it. After all, England was in the business of gulling its wealthy Colonial cousins in the hope that they might pay through the nose to acquire some gimcrack heirlooms from the 'old country'.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers.
It might do for a 'dialect' writer from the Celtic fringes or a troglodyte proletarian like D.H. Lawrence.
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind;
What I think 'creative', my brother is extremely critical of precisely because it is no such thing. Still, it is interesting that a hyper-intelligent foreign observer thought the English of the period had just the one brain cell between them.
and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.
Where there is creativity, it is diverse and highly critical of what is unlike, or too like, itself.
We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous.
France had a more centralized educational system and anti-clerical laws- particularly those of 1905- had created a far greater degree of polarization than on the other side of the Channel where ecumenicism of a common-sense type had triumphed. Who cared if a particular 'Woodbine Willie' (i.e. a clergyman ministering to soldiers in the trenches and sharing their discomforts) was High Church or Low Church or a fucking Anabaptist?
Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.
Indeed. It is one thing to say 'no Sex, please. We're British.' It is another to refuse to think at all. The Great War showed that lions ought not to be led by somnambulistic sheep.
One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else.
What's wrong with that? If the guy makes money- as Kipling made money- he will soon have imitators in plenty. Thus the innovation which began as his monopoly soon comes into greater and greater circulation such that everyone can have as much of it as they want. Sadly, some aspects of genius are inimitable. But this is not immediately apparent. There was a time when Aleister Crowley might have appeared a promising rival for W.B Yeats or when some bright spark might plausibly claim that Wyndham Lewis would be remembered for his poetry when Yanks like Eliot & Pound were forgotten.
In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man.
If we are speaking of a contemporary, we are guessing at his likely trajectory. There was a certain amount of sex in Eliot's poetry and he got a job as a banker. Might he become the Philodemus of the Georgians writing poems which Churchill, surely the Cicero of his age, would describe as elegantly lascivious? Philodemus, it will be remembered, was an Epicurean Economist. Eliot, as a Banker, might prescribe a Keynesian solution for the economic woes of his adopted country. As things were, Eliot moved in a High Anglican direction. Would a critic in 1919 really have been able to predict this?
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors;
Not really. It is his contemporaries against whom he must compete. I suppose, a lecturer would dwell on the such matters but only because the great writers' rivals had been forgotten almost immediately.
we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.
Enjoyment requires no such thing. Valuation does. That which is scarce has higher value. Diamonds may sparkle like glass. But diamonds can't be scratched. This isolates them in a class of their own which then gets a higher valuation.
Whereas if we approach a poet without this 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 poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
We will find this sooner and more abundantly if we double down on this prejudice. Who is the Dante of our age? There can only be one. Virgil isn't a fucking tour guide by profession. He will descend into Avernus with only the pick of our crop of poets. Oddly, it was Eliot- who hadn't served in the Trenches- not Graves or Sassoon or PG Woodhouse's elder brother who'd been awarded the Newdigate- who captured the terrible waste involved in that 'No Man's land' separating us from those bestial Huns who were, alas, our own mirror image.
And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.
So, Keats gets a pass- just barely. But not Chatterton.
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged.
Only if poetry wasn't truly 'mantic' or consubstantial with the blood and flesh it invokes. At any rate, that would be the position Eliot himself would embrace, at least when it came to religion. I suppose, as an American, he had a greater appreciation of the manner in which the English language was in flux as astonishing developments in the mass-media- the gramophone, the radio, the talkies, unfolded over the next decade. Still, it was always possible that he himself might find he had inscribed something 'classical'- i.e. 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed'- which might leap from lip to lip to posterity though his own volume of highly wrought lucubrations 'fell stillborn from the press'.
We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.
Not if we like its novelty in which case we demand its repetition. At least, that's what Agatha Christie and P.G Woodhouse were finding out at that time.
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance.
No. Tradition is of merely traditional significance. True, that significance may be wider than the world but it isn't wilder or more weird.
It cannot be inherited,
Nor can it not be inherited. All we can say is that none knows to whom to appeal for or against probate.
and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.
Unless you don't want it but are stuck with it. When I was young I wanted to astound assemblies with my wit. It is only now, in my dotage, that I prize my far more useful gift of being able to clear a crowded room with a single fart.
It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year;
guys who get paid for their poetry double down on it because, after their 25th year, they are likely to have more mouths to feed.
and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; 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.
This is literally true. On my bookshelf, Homer does indeed rub shoulders with Harold Robbins. I've read Homer. Robbins I found too difficult.
This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.
No. It is a sense of how to recycle the same tired old formula by adding one or two topical touches. The great British Christmas Panto- i.e. Widow Twankey & so on- can be traced back to the eighteenth century.
And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
Writers of that description produce unreadable shite. Literature is merely a service industry. Find your niche in the market and remember 'bis repetita placent'. Eliot didn't stop with one Quartet. He produced four of the darned things.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.
Unless he is all alone.
His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.
That can be a wholly solitary endeavour.
You cannot value him alone;
You can value an artist of a particular type even if you know nothing of his precursors or, indeed, if no record remains of his epoch or civilization.
you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
Nonsense! We may value Omar Khayyam without knowing or caring about the long tradition of 'khamriyat' in Arabic and Persian. We may like Li Po- Pound's 'Rihaku'- thinking him a Japanese contemporary of Hokusai rather than a T'ang contemporary of Tu Fu & Wang Wei. There are people all over the world who know one or two plays of Shakespeare without knowing or wanting to know about Marlowe or Dekker.
I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.
Both must cut their coat according to their cloth. You can't compare and contrast an artist whose work has survived to that of his precursors or rivals which have vanished or are very difficult to access.
The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
In other words, it isn't a necessity at all. Rather it is a desiderata of a particular type of connoisseur or critic. If people say 'have you seen 'Game of Thrones'? It's mind blowing', there is bound to be a high-brow cunt who will say something like- 'Martin's work modifies and is modified by our reception of 'Friends' & 'South Park'. Any TV series people rave about is connected to every other TV series they raved about or will rave about. Thus, the depiction of 'Brienne of Tarth' in 'Thrones' alters our appreciation of Jennifer Aniston in 'Murder Mystery' and vice versa.'
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,
in the eye of some high-brow bore
which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
That 'modification' may be mad or absurd. 'Murder in the Cathedral' should not modify the ideal order to which 'The Mousetrap' belongs even if both plays are running at adjacent Theatres in the West End.
The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;
It may be. It may not. Michaelangelo completed Sangallo's work, itself a product of the 'operative criticism' of his predecessor, Raphael, who had himself succeeded and made significant changes to Bramante's plan for St. Peter's.
for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered;
as indeed happened during the Renaissance or any other epoch of innovation.
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.
It may be. It may not. Conformity may matter at some times and in some fields- e.g. when constructing a Cathedral complex over several generations- but not in others.
Whoever has approved this idea of order,
was it Professor Saintsbury? No? Please Sir, is the answer 'Matthew Arnold'?
of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered
That is preposterous. What people think of the past may be altered but the Past is not altered.
by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
The present may chose to imitate what it thinks occurred in the past. It isn't directed by it.
And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
Because poets are sooooo important. The Great War consisted largely of platoons of poets screaming sonnets at each other across No Man's land.
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.
He may hold himself to that standard. The market won't. 'Thrones' doesn't have to compete with Shakespeare. It has to take ratings from 'Vikings' or 'the Witcher'.
I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics.
Judgments don't matter. Sales do.
It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art.
It might be. It might not. One can always sneeringly say 'this is craftsmanship, it isn't Art.' but the rejoinder is 'this is carping. It isn't criticism.'
And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.
I suppose 'fitting in' mattered a lot in England at that time- or so a Yank might have thought.
We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.
Eliot fitted in without losing his American dynamism. But he was super-smart with a PhD in Philosophy. After a successful career in Banking he nurtured talent as a publisher with Faber & Faber. His own oeuvre had a tremendous influence even in distant Ind.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past:
we might wonder why young people in Calcutta might prefer Eliot's bleak view of Vedanta to that of Tagore. Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, Indians- under British influence- were talking about the need for 'naturalism'. But what did it entail? Gassing on about the poor? That could be done in traditional poetic forms. But what Joyce & Eliot introduced was the stream of consciousness and the radical alienation of the poet who alone could conduct a sort of 'tuirgen' knight's tour of the various consciousness existing side by side in a society. In the past, the butcher of the Vyadha Gita or the carter of the Chandogya could speak in the same way and inhabited the same mental universe as the 'snatak' scholar. Now, 'investigative birth seeking' or just entering into the life-world of the women or the working class involved either a higher askesis or the risk of language itself disintegrating.
he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period.
Why? 'Naturalism' no longer meant remarking 'yon solitary Highland lass'. It meant entering her mental world. What would be found there? Perhaps something more ancient, more atavistic, than Electra.
Joyce appears to have subscribed to Haekel's belief that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It may be that, as you walk down the Strand, you pass minds stuck in different epochs. The crossing sweeper is in Egyptian bondage. The police-man is a Roman legionary. The stolid seeming Stockbroker, who nevertheless haunts the Grosvenor Gallery indifferent to the ebb and flow of his fortune, is a throwback to the caveman of Altamira who knows he will be abandoned by his tribe when his prowess as a hunter wanes. Then, at last, his dream of his quarry can more fully possess him and carry him to a happier hunting ground.
The first course is inadmissible,
It is otiose. What nourished us is always in the Past.
the second is an important experience of youth,
or a wholly unimportant phase or fad- like growing side-burns.
and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement.
Not for his Mum. She wishes the cunt would just get a job with the Gas Board instead of swanning around like Oscar fucking Wilde.
The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.
Consciousness is not required. An unconscious influence may achieve more fecund expression.
He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves,
It may do. It may not. It depends on the market.
but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe
clearly a deeply schizophrenic or suicidal mind- unlike the mind of America
—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—
I suppose one could say that no Englishman could deny that his country had made up its mind to fight for the sake of the fucking Belgians.
is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.
This is true of Literature to the same extent as it is true of Accountancy and Finance. Book keeping is what permitted the development of a market for books.
That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement.
Getting paid more is generally considered an improvement.
Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is
that stuff changes in the present. It doesn't in the past.
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.
The past can't do shit- not even order a Pizza & diet coke. That's why it is a mistake to shack up with it.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because
they are buried six feet underground and thus can't show up for parties
we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.
Among other things.
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry),
there have always been some very erudite poets. Eliot may have been obscure at certain points but his work did not smell of the lamp. It wasn't his fault he had a PhD.
a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. 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.
This is true enough. The plain fact is, some illiterate fools can produce good poetry while some brilliant, scholarly, aesthetes produce doggerel or, more commonly, diarrhoea.
What is to be insisted upon
if one wants a particular quality in a particular poet
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.
It would have been reasonable to want Eliot to go in that direction at that time. Cole Porter- not so much.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable.
What he is at the moment may be more interesting. We may want to know about the reprobate before he got religion and went off to minister to lepers on some South Sea island.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
A particular sort of artist, sure. But the opposite sort may better serve the same exalted purpose.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition.
Eliot has done so already. Surrender. The Germans had done so. The French would do so. Sadly, Anglo Saxons are made of sterner stuff.
It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.
Actually, Science at the time could boast a celebrated personality- Albert Einstein- who became more iconic than Tagore. One may say, both Art and Science were changed by 'crucial experiments'. In 1919, the Eddington expedition confirmed Einstein's theory. Joyce's and Eliot's experiments were similarly successful. Relativity meant there could be 'no privileged frame of reference' or 'grand narrative' unfolding in Newtonian time. What is interesting about 4 Quartets is that it seems to anticipate 'multiverse' theory. Perhaps, this is 'misprision'. The word 'quark' comes from Joyce's 'Wake'. I can understand neither but when gazing wistfully at a bowl of pomegranates my farts express an intellectually appreciation of 'something more subtly inter-fused' in both.
I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.
The platinum acts as a catalyst in the production of sulphur trioxide which is important in the industrial production of sulphuric acid. But would Eliot really have welcomed the industrialization of the acid reflux of lit. crit produced by a State subsidised salariat?
II
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
Sadly, the industrialization of lit. crit. militated on psychoanalyzing the poet or speculating on the manner he upheld or subverted some sinister and occult Biopolitical regime.
If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it.
I suppose a critic of poetry could himself write good poetry. Pope certainly did so.
I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written.
I think Eliot or Pound's poetry did this well enough. The question was whether their works could stand alone without the 'olde worlde' scaffolding- so to speak? Perhaps, these were second rate scribblers who had crossed the Atlantic to play dress-up in Elizabethan or Florentine clothes. Genuine American poets were brawny fellows with little book-larnin'- like Walt Whitman.
The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author.
Sadly, the Lit Crit industry took a very personal interest in Eliot. Every detail of his exiguous sex life has been held up to examination. Was he primarily an Onanist or some sort of closet Queen or- more damningly- the unconscious tool of Neoliberal 'repressive desublimation'?
And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being
mature rather than immature. A similar point can be made about a mature Claims Adjuster or Chartered Accountant.
a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
A mature Claims Adjuster may have developed a 'gut instinct'. Chartered Accountants, in riper years, can be very fucking creative to the great chagrin of the Tax Inspector.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only 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.
This is true of your Solicitor or Accountant. They can greatly alter your condition- e.g. keep you out of jail or the poor-house- without being altered in any way. It's all in a day's work for them.
The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.
I suppose there are poets who can write as good a Eulogy on Florence Nightingale as on Jack the Ripper. But what they resemble most is the seasoned Barrister or Stock Broker who became indifferent to the quality or fate of his clients long ago.
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.
I suppose a Banker or a Stock Broker should cultivate an equanimity of this sort. Don't get too attached to the client. The silly sausage may get drunk and blow his fortune at the roulette table. You can't bail him out with an unsecured loan even if you were best friends at School.
A poet, however, need to cleave to so strict a code. What matters is whether he writes well. Sadly, this may only occur when he does stupid shit or gets sucked into doing stupid shit.
The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings.
A catalyst provides a surface for other chemical agents which lowers the activation energy required for their chemical reaction. It is wholly inert and has no 'thoughts' or 'feelings'. Poets do. Like great actors, it is likely that they briefly or vicariously enter into the psychological state they describe. Flaubert could justifiably say- 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' Eliot carries forward this project of literary hermaphroditism we find in Balzac and Malfatti. He, for a moment, truly is Tiresias. Then that moment passes. Our mind busies itself trying to recall whether it was Laforgue or Dujardin who said, 'La reine Victoria, c'est moi.' Fuck. Just Googled it. The answer is Clemenceau.
The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art.
Similarly the effect of a kick in the slats is different from any experience not of a kick in the slats.
It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result.
Also true of a kick in the slats. Along with the pain is mingled various emotions- remorse, perhaps, but also relief that your wife didn't chop off your goolies. One thing is clear. It was a mistake to say her sister looks hot.
Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail.
Dante was grateful to his teacher but was obliged to consign him to the circle of the sodomites because that is what Latini was by common report. Still, Dante makes it clear, it was some other bloke he fucked.
The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to.
That is too general. It might be said about any remark of our own which surprises us by its pungency or the light it throws upon our own unconscious mind. The question for the literary critic, or- indeed- the devout votary of the Comedy- is to what extent Dante continues or properly completes a project Latini had priority in inaugurating. It is possible that there is something older here- an Italian revulsion from 'Greek' pederasty and its claim to greater continence in such matters.
The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
Everybody has a mind of that sort. Specific poets- Dante, Eliot- may be writing for other poets more particularly when they write against them. Others may not bother. What can't be gainsaid is that Eliot and Pound changed how poetry was written by unreadable poets in distant lands over subsequent decades.
If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark.
A criterion for poetry which is not itself poetic has already missed the mark. If it is sublimely poetic, it is itself the mark it hits. But one could equally say a criteria for a good audit misses the mark unless it is itself a good audit of existing auditing methods. At that point it is 'prescriptive' in the sense that it causes auditing practice to improve.
For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
But is this 'pressure' bracketed or stored in a jar such that poetry is 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'? After all, naturalistic poetry can't pretend that people under pressure pause to express themselves in a comprehensive or canonical terms. This is where the ghazal tradition wins out. The emotion fleetingly felt, flows onward more deeply than can be felt. The Wasteland is itself the garden of its own Wasteland- or 'koi Virani si Virani hai' as Ghalib put it. Love is a Second Creation. Its God Grief. Here is a mise en abyme- a mirror reflecting itself in other mirrors- in which, the best we can hope is that if our fleeting image is glimpsed, 'tis only in the eye of that Euridice whom we thereby lose irrevocably.
The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of.
It is a bookish emotion- 'a Gallehaut was that book and he who wrote it'. Dante was distinguishing himself from the Goliard tradition. People get very emotional when it comes to matters affecting their own professional esteem or standing.
It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion.
It is hack-work.
Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante.
Dante wasn't writing a play. In the same year Eliot wrote this, Miquel Asin Palacios brought out a book on the Islamic influence on Dante's Comedy. Borges, I believe, picks up the question of whether a single narrator can do justice to dramatic situation where two or more characters have complex (we might say 'chaotic' in the mathematical sense) interactions which may not be effectively computable or canonically representable. This is the theme of Borges's 'Averroes' search'. I suppose the answer is- a good enough job can be done under certain 'boundary conditions'. But that is true of anything linguistic or semiotic.
In the Agamemnon,
there is a stage. There are actors. There is 'mimesis' of actions not mere description or allusion.
the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator;
it may do. It may not. We understand that our visceral reaction is meant to attach itself to some quite different, perhaps wholly abstract, object though our instinctual reaction is quite different.
in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself.
We share his emotion. Desdemona is as lovely as a lily and as chaste. We hate the act as much as he who perpetrated it very quickly comes to do.
But the difference between art and the event is always absolute;
It may be. It may not. Events may be artistically orchestrated. Art may itself be an event.
the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements.
Up to a point. But it is also a point at which we can unpick things or, indeed, put in things never intended. Freud, at about this time, was making a lot of money out of reading things into Oedipus but not Orestes because guys love their Mummies and will pay good money to talk about her. Guys who want to kill their Mums won't pay you. Instead, they will cut bits off you while laughing maniacally.
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.
This is also true of my ode to the Big Mac. What makes Keats's poem different is that the fucker rote gud. Me- not so much.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul:
In other words, it is purely a matter of pragmatics- how words are used. We would say, used one way, a word solves a 'coordination problem' which gives rise to a 'cheap talk' or pooling equilibrium which is good enough for some purposes. But, used with a different intonation, the same word gives rise to a 'discoordination game' which may have greater utility because it supports a 'costly signal' based 'separating equilibria'. Thus, in the former case we agree that everyone has a soul which is naturally inclined toward the True, the Beautiful and the God. In the latter case, we decide that the editor of the Poetry magazine who rejected us has no soul. The fellow is a ghoul- who relishes chewing the corpses of poets whose spirit died long ago.
for my meaning is, 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 combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.
Is 'the medium the message'? I don't think that is what Eliot is getting at. His poetry, at that time, was like the ouija board or tarot cards used by a medium. There was some message being conveyed to him...What was it? Where would it take him? Nowhere shocking. He was born a Unitarian and moved towards Anglo-Catholicism. Nothing wrong in that at all. His study of Sanskrit & the Upanishads hadn't been in vain.
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.
Poetry, after all, was as much a profession as Chartered Accountancy. Addison's poetry gained him lucrative offices of profit.
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:
And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her? . . .
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of
two types of rodmontade. This can be appreciated as high camp. The other view is that Middleton overegged the pudding.
positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it.
The English consider this 'Italian'. Beerbohm's 'Savanarola Brown' pretty much killed off that literary byway taken by disciples of Robert Browning. Pound, sadly, took no notice.
This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it.
The situation is so contrived as to be farcical.
This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama.
No. The gross out factor is some dude French-kissing a skull whose jaw has been poisoned.
But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.
James I appears to have been bisexual. There were hijinks at court. What was lacking was any great emotion other than avarice.
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting.
It may be. Emotions may be thought of as Darwinian algorithms of the mind which may become linked to particular action repertoires. The poet of a period may give a name to, or otherwise promote, a particular emotion, or modality of reception, which has 'survival value'. This may be associated with an 'inner exile' or ontological dysphoria which may itself create 'positional goods' or give rise to changes in material culture.
Au fond, everything is economic.
His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
But he might see that the market he serves might be better served by cultivating a different emotional response- e.g. resignation rather than anger- to particular provocations which are becoming more frequent.
The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life.
At a time of general catastrophe- e.g. during the Great War- the unusual emotions of a Bengali poet who had recently suffered repeated domestic bereavements proved to have utility not just for young soldiers but also their mothers back home. Since Germany lost the War, the cult of Tagore was more intense there when Eliot wrote this.
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.
Sadly, what was perverse may become de rigueur as circumstances change.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
This is not the case if life evolved by natural selection. Emotions and feelings and so forth represent co-evolved processes and thus may not be directly linked to the fitness landscape. However, something like the law of increasing functional information applies. There will be convergent evolution such that the function performed by such emotions or feelings improves.
Consider Eliot's theory of 'disassociation of sensibility' which, so far as I can see, simply corresponded to the refinement and standardization of 'Chancery English' prose as England rose commercially and industrially.
something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning;
by which time middle class women expressed themselves as rationally and cogently as Members of Parliament
it is the difference between the intellectual poet
like Coleridge or Mathew Arnold?
and the reflective poet.
Dover Beach is plenty reflective.
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.
England had undergone a Science based Industrial Revolution. The language of the educated had become more functionally specialized and so its system of metaphors could, powered by its own steam, run upon 'ringing grooves of change' becoming more streamlined in the process. Browning died two or three years after the first automobile took to the road.
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
Donne was a clergyman who believed in the 'real presence' of Christ in the Eucharist at a time when this was contentious. His sensibility was bound to be different from those who lived in the age of Darwin and the steam engine.
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience;
Sadly, the poet's mind was and is greatly inferior to the scientist or even the entrepreneur. One might say that, as England rose economically thanks to technological innovation, the law of increasing functional information militated against hyper-mentalism and a highly correlated mental universe undergirded by things like the 'theory of signatures'. Magical thinking waned. Mechanistic thinking waxed. This was fine from the Christian point of view. Faith is based on a mystery. Not God, but goblins stand in fear of Physics.
the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.
Which is why poets and songwriters can make a bit of money giving a name to such things so as to improve functional performance of a useful type.
The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other,
Nor should they. The right answer to 'when did you first know?' isn't 'when I read the 24th proposition of Spinoza'. It is when 'your girl friend passed you the pepper and you sneezed. You crinkle up your nose so adorably. Like a bunny rabbit. You iz ma cutesy tootsy l'il bunny wabbit'.
or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
No. These are qualifiers or 'individuating' predicates. This is the opposite of gestalt formation which is characteristically 'multiply realizable' or robust to addition or subtraction.
We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,
lived in a pre-industrial age riven by religious and political faction and fighting
possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.
and remain famished by it. It was the abstract, mathematical, method of deductive reasoning which offered a path out of the morass of bitter experience and a disappointed Millennialism.
They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, or Cino.
No. The nature of the State was quite different. The question was whether wealth would be allowed to accumulate or would men decay in courtly intrigue or factional vendetta.
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered;
i.e. the English people began to rise and rise. The law triumphed over the caprice of despots or the intrigue of factions. Newton, as Master of the Mint, curbed the clipping of coins. Henceforth, Gresham law was reversed. What gained currency was sound, solid, and worthy of trust. What lost currency was malice and its shadowy magics.
and this dissociation, as is natural,
Not 'natural' but 'functional' by reason of the increasing reward for rational choice.
was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
Why were they 'powerful'? The answer is that they were sound Classicists ready to serve the State and not at all averse to the 'plain style' in prose advocated by the Royal Society. Let the English Aeschylus be Aeschylus. The English Cicero be Cicero. The language was welcome to become as plain and functional as best served to increase its wealth and strength. If people had more money in their pockets, they could send their sons to public schools thus creating a market for books published in Greek typography. This in turn would permit the emergence of a class of poets who could gain financial independence by translating the Greek and Latin classics. Wealth and Security were the best supports for Literature. But the mathematical and natural sciences could raise the rate of return on commerce and industry. It would be folly not to 'disassociate' sensibilities so that the cash value of a coal mine outweighed the fragrance of howsoever many a daffo-fucking-dill.
Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude.
They serve a better purpose.
The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress.
Very true. Thomas Gray wanted to dig up the bones of some village of Hampden for the purpose of sodomy. By contrast, Andrew Marvell just wanted to get his leg over some slag. That's not crude at all.
The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation.
Milton, despite his own unhappy first marriage, championed the sort of nuclear family- husband and wife bound together by a love for which Eden were were well lost- which tamed the American wilderness and, serving the East India Company, turned India into the most boring shithole on the face of the planet- an outcome for which we are still grateful.
The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued.
Sentiment sells when even smut fails to find a market.
The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced;
Fuck the poets. Grub street was turning out better and better travelogues and other informative prose for a Nation of entrepreneurial strivers.
they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility.
As there are in Holderlin who went mad. Shelley died before he could go thoroughly to the bad.
But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
They were industrious and served the same market as Sir Walter Scott and Lord Macaulay. In their different ways, they set the stage for the only wholly indigenous Artistic movements in this country. On the other hand, W.S Gilbert was a better versifier.
After this brief exposition of a theory--too brief, perhaps, to carry conviction--we may ask, what would have been the fate of the "metaphysical" had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in a direct line to them?
This is nonsense. Metaphysics changed with Descartes. Mannerism is mutable because manners are mutable.
They would not, certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better;
Are there any intelligent poets? Perhaps. Maxwell wrote poetry. But he is known as a Physicist.
the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically.
Why make any such condition? Did Eliot demand poetry from Bradley or Whitehead or Russell? Did anybody?
A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved.
The Germans considered Alexander Pope a philosopher. Russell thought Byron was a philosopher. Did Eliot agree? No.
The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.
This was taken over by the psychologists and psychoanalysts.
Returning to the 'Tradition' essay, we find Eliot places no great importance on naming or defining a particular emotion or state of mind. In other words, unlike Brouwer of the 'Significs' circle, he wasn't claiming any particular importance for intuitions whether conventional or novel.
And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.
Emotions fulfil a function. That is why we have them. One which we understand serves its purpose better because the associated action repertoires are more efficient or firmly established. It's good to know what you are feeling is Sadness. The remedy is chocolate. Lots of chocolate.
Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula.
It's probably exact enough. Guys seated in comfy armchairs composing poems about daffodils aren't exactly seething with fury.
For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity.
A recollected emotion is indeed different from an emotion or a recollection. But that's also true of a recollected fart. As for tranquillity, perhaps it is incompatible with cacoethes scribendi- the insatiable itch to write.
It is a concentration,
It may be, or it may not. Lots of poetry is pretty loosey-goosey and just keeps rambling on like Wordsworth's 'Excursion'.
and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.
There need be no experiences. A concrete image might have more force. T.E Hulme's 'Imagism' had seemed promising three or four years previously.
These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
Eliot is right to distinguish boredom from tranquillity.
Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” 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.
The same thing may be said of emotion or personality or farting or adjusting an Insurance claim. Each is its own way of escaping itself.
It may be that at the time when Eliot was writing, some special importance was accorded the poet. In the squalid terrors of the trenches some new irenic strain may have been incubated which, henceforth, would make young men immune to the stirring stanzas of Tyrtaeus or the siren song the Valkyries are wont to sing.
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Only those who have trained as Chartered Accountants know what it means to want to escape existence of every sort.
III
δ δε νους ισως Θειοτερον τι και απαθες εστιν
This is a quotation from Aristotle. The relevant passage is as follows-
But mind seems to be an independent substance.This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism,
Apart from being a poet, Eliot's mother was a Social Worker. I suppose halting at the frontier mentioned would mean that folk could concentrate on making the world a better place for their fellow citizens. Arthur Hugh Clough was a good poet. He spent a lot of his time helping Florence Nightingale. Come to think of it, Tagore spent a lot of time seeking to improve the condition of his tenants. Indeed, he used his Nobel Prize money to set up a cooperative Bank for them.
The problem here is that crossing the frontier into mysticism doesn't preclude an even more intense engagement with helping the poor.
My own thesis is that Eliot, aware that bien pensant British Idealism was played out, suspected that beyond physics is a purer type of physics more purged of anything antrhopocentric or pertaining to, the 'natural' intuitions of the Physicist, and that the same may be true of language. Perhaps, Frege's Logicism, as repaired by Russell, would triumph. Metaphysics would be stripped of its mask of fallacy. Language, erecting itself, through a ramified type theory, into its own meta-language, might continually refine itself and render its surface smooth and seamless thus expelling such poets as had gained a brief sanctuary in some crack or fissure of a skin it was already ready to slough off.
and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry.
Here is the pragmatic strain of a C.S Pierce or, indeed, the young Norbert Weiner.
To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad.
There was a time when people found poetry as easy to read- or easier- than prose. Erasmus Darwin wrote in verse. Charles didn't.
There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse,
more yet appreciate smut or scatology expressed in limericks.
and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence.
Sadly, amongst that small coterie, there was an increasing distaste for it precisely because it had been beaten into you at Prep School.
But 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.
But 'life in a poem' was like 'life in a romance novel' or 'life in a cowboy movie'. The thing may help you pass the time but the same could be said of masturbation. As for poetry, you suspected that there were mothers who thought it might be a suitable profession for their incorrigibly stupid sons or exceptionally homely daughters. It was such mothers who bought your chapbooks so as to provide their children with proof that you don't need to have talent, or much in the way of literacy, to be a 'modern' poet. Also, pen and ink are cheaper than oil paints and canvas.
The emotion of art is impersonal.
Yet artists take it personally if you tell them a retarded five year old could make a better fist of things. You have a fucking Collidge degree! Fuck is wrong with you?
And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.
We can see why Eliot made a good banker. I suppose, by then, America was the one great creditor nation. Perhaps 'the Wasteland' wouldn't have been so bleak if European countries had followed sensible monetary policies in the post-war years.
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,
I suppose this is what Bankers do. A good poet, it may be, can create Faith- which is a type of Belief or Credit. But the Banking system's entire purpose is Credit Creation. Eliot saw that Europe was living the wrong 'present moment of the past'. A big smash-up was coming. It took 3 million American troops to rescue Europe from its own Erinyes.
unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
This was the positive aspect of Modernism. They were capable of- if not a tender regard for, then an avuncular interest in- each other's infantile productions. But they had talent. Their epigones didn't. Still, what was unfortunate was the burgeoning of a parasitical Academic Heavy Industry strip-mining to no good purpose the personalities, pecadilloes or paranoid ideations of Eliot and his ilk.
As for 'Impersonality', Copilot provides it 5 seconds. Consider the following-
Adapted from William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Rendered in the style of T.S. Eliot
I
I moved among streetlamps’ weary glow,
A solitary figure in a city’s hush—
The concrete valleys stacked in muted rows
While traffic murmured distant, tired thrum.
II
Then, suddenly, a flicker beyond the pavement’s edge:
A scattered congregation of pale marigolds
Shivering at the curb like restless specters,
Each one trembling beneath a sterile light.
III
They stood in sombre defiance of the gray—
Their yellow faces turned away from dawn,
Yet through the static of my restless mind
I caught a pulse of something once alive.
IV
Later, in my dim room, the hush returned;
Memory draped itself in soft arabesques.
Those ghostly blooms persisted in the gloom—
A quiet chord in the city’s muted psalm.
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