Eliot Makes in Tradition and

¶ … Eliot makes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is the supposed lack of tradition in English writing. He counters this by explaining that tradition is impossible to escape, and that this view is just a prejudice that makes us insist that the best parts of our poets -- the details we can point to that make a great poet stand out -- are the arts that are completely original; departures from what has been done before.

As Eliot put is, "In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors." In this, Eliot contends, we are merely fooling ourselves, and the parts of a poem that were thought of as original often carry the strongest elements of tradition.

This leads to another one of Eliot's major points, that "no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone." Rather, Eliot believes that a poem and poet is always judged in terms of the past, but at the same time this past is shaped by current poetic endeavors. Eliot has a complex view of the past as an entity that changes and shifts as perspectives are added to it, and at the same time judges and alters the present future.

Eliot contends that the true poet requires a knowledge of the past and current rends, not so that he can avoid them completely, but so he can find his often place in that living past. Knowledge of the past, for Eliot, must be complete if it is to be effective; he comments that the poet must be aware of all of the past's individual elements, not just history as a single lump or a few favorite periods, but the long stretch of it and the distance that it covers.

This also ties into Eliot's idea of the "Mind of Europe," which he contends is the sort of poetic organism that is the constantly shifting and altering English poetic canon of past and present. Another of Eliot's key points in this essay is his concept of the poet's mind as a sort of catalytic chamber.

He compares the ideas and emotions to two volatile gases, and suggests that he poet's mind is the inert substance that allows these two gases -- or this combination of feelings and emotions -- to combine and form something unique, creating an experience for the viewer/reader of the art that is "an experience different in kind from any experience not of art." The unique ability of art, according to Eliot, is to reflect these shifting emotions and feelings at exactly the right time.

To achieve this, Eliot theorizes what he calls the mature mind. This mature mind is not necessarily wiser than an immature one; it des not have a stronger sense of identity or "self," but is "a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations." This is also a part of Eliot's theory of Impersonal Poetry, which also relates to the past and living tradition that Eliot claims all English poets are a part of.

Impersonal Poetry is perhaps the most essential point of "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Basically, Eliot theorizes that in order to produce truly great poetry, the poet needs to surrender himself to the past; to that living European mind of poetry. This is both cause and effect, in a way, of he living mind, in fact. Because each new work automatically shapes and alters the mind of Europe, it is already detached from the poet. It has become something larger and more eternal.

At the same time, this shifting mind subsumes anything that a poet creates, forcing an impersonal quality on the poet regardless of the intent. This continuous cycle of subsuming and surrendering begins to blur the line between the private mind and the living mind of Europe, making poetry impersonal not by diminishing the value of the individual poet, but by incorporating it.

2) Plato was obsessed with discovering truth, and considered deviation from truth or the ideal to be a generally bad thing -- after all, he theorized, why settle for an imperfect copy when the ideal original is out there? Of course, the ideal did not exist in the mortal world, but Plato still believed that what was right was to search as completely as one could in this world for truth and the ideal, and that any deviation from this constant quest for truth was foolish at best and possibly even immoral.

Poetry is seen as just such an attempt at deviating from the truth. In Plato's day, poetry and theatre were largely the same thing, and his comments applied equally to what we consider to separate and distinct artistic arenas. Plato's concept and "proof" of the falsehood inherent to poetry involved his famous construct of the universe as containing and ideal world outside of the mortal realm.

This ideal world is the world -- which most likely he did not believe literally existed, but which rather is a mental and philosophical landscape -- of real truth; it is occupied by ideal objects -- the ideal horse, the ideal house, the ideal everything. Everything we see and interact with in our own world, according to this worldview of Plato's, is merely a copy of this ideal world, and an imperfect copy at that.

Every horse has a little imperfection; none of them are absolutely identical to the ideal horse. Yet all of them are recognizable as horses, despite their differences, because this ideal horse exists. This imperfect world allows us to guess at the ideal world of truth. If this world is merely an imperfect copy of the ideal world, than poetry and art -- according to Plato -- are really just imperfect copies of that imperfect copy.

This is the concept of mimesis, which can be roughly translated as imitation or representation; it is also where the word "mimicry" comes from. Plato believes that not only is this the only thing that poetry is capable of, but that in fact it is poetry's goal to hold up the falsehoods it creates as instructive modes of behavior and living. In the Republic, he determines that poetry, as it dos not seek truth and in fact propagates falsehood, has no place in his perfect city.

He sees the education of the youth in poetry as a corruptive influence, especially on minds too young to fully understand the difference between truth and falsehood. Aristotle's view of mimesis is somewhat different. He also believed that the purpose of art and poetry, or at least the method, was to imitate and represent nature. However Aristotle also believed that art could use mathematics and other aspects of human knowledge to improve on nature in a constant quest for the ideal.

This quest, similar in stated purpose to Plato's but hugely different in effect. Aristotle believes in the power of poetry and mimesis to show us the world in ways we would otherwise not be able to see it, often at a safer distance. For both of these ancient Greeks, poetry was completely linked with theatre; Aristotle believed that the best poems had to be performed, not merely read aloud or even worse, silently. They also must evoke strong feelings that are then purged through catharsis.

For Plato, the best poems would be those that approached closest to the truth, but even these would be inadequate.

4) Ezra Pound opens his essay on modern poetry, "The Retrospect," with three main points that he and some of his colleagues agreed on as necessary elements in their new style of poetry: first, that the "thing" of the poem must be dealt with directly, whether in an objective or subjective fashion; second, that no word that does not contribute to the presentation of the poem's subject should ever be used in the poem; and third, that the rhythm of poem should be created "in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." From these three basic rules, Pound goes on in "Retrospect" to extrapolate a whole system of poetics, which he describes at length as a new school in poetry.

The issue, as Pound sees it, is that later additions to this school "do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification." Pound is all about stripping the poem away to its most essential elements, and he sees the breakdown of rhyme and the rigid metrical structure of iambs and trochees as an opportunity to achieve this bareness which will in turn reveal the clarity of the idea or object at the center of a work of poetry.

Other poets, he contends, are still adding unnecessary words to their poems "without even the excuse that the words are shoveled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound." For Pound, the Image should be central to the poem; this is the "thing" that needs to be dealt with solely and directly, without any extraneous words, in musical meter.

Pounds definition of an image is "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." That is, an image as Pound uses the term is a snapshot; it is a motionless artifact, spontaneously and completely captured by the poet and transmitted via the poem to the reader without any additional trappings.

The effect of such an image is one of "liberation;" it is the "sense of freedom from time limits and space limits." Images exist outside of time and space; they are not representations of shift but eternal constructs -- Pound uses the word complex -- that exist somehow outside the mind, somewhat like Plato's concept of the ideal. Imagism is the school of poetry that Ezra Pound and other colleagues founded in an attempt to both define and propagate this type of poetry ad the idea of the Image.

Pound even says "It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works." One example of the image Pound describes would be the plums of William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say." Though the poem also contains aspects of action and character, the language has been reduced to only what is necessary, and the strange quality that time achieves in this poem has the effect of freezing the moment in which the note was left -- it is not being written or read, but is simply a note in a moment -- perhaps this note, then, is the true image of the poem.

In an effort to get people to understand the Imagist school of poetry, Pound includes a list of "don't's for the would-be poet.

Among these are admonitions not to consider anything -- not even Pound's poetic rules -- as dogma, not to mix the abstract with the concrete as this weakens the image, to use no ornamentation or, if one must, to make sure it is good, and also to "Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it." This last, despite its humor, also ties into Eliot's idea of the living mind of the English canon, and how one must both draw from and contribute to it.

Extra Credit: Though the term is at least as old as 1840 when it first appeared in a work by Washington Allston, the idea of the "objective correlative" as it relates to poetry was first described and popularized by T.S.

Eliot in his essay "Hamlet and His Problem." In this essay, Eliot claims that Hamlet is ultimately an artistic failure because the emotions that the lead character portrays are too strong to be supported by the plot -- there is no objective correlative that leads inevitably to the emotions that Hamlet supposedly experiences. Eliot does not only deplore the lack of the objective correlative in Hamlet, but suggests that it can be.