\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}

\title{Tradition and the Individual Talent}

\author{T.S. Eliot (1888--1965)}  

\date{1922}

%The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.  1922.

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{}

IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we
  occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. 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.'' 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
  arch\ae ological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable
  to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring
  science of arch\ae ology.    

  Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of
  living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its
  own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more
  oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits
  than of those of its creative genius. 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. 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. 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 anyone else. 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, especially his
  immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be
  isolated in order to be enjoyed. 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. And I do not mean the impressionable period of
  adolescence, but the period of full maturity. 

  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. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in
  the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a
  matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if
  you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the
  first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly
  indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his
  twenty-fifth year; 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 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. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most
  acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. 

  No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
  significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation
  to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must
  set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as
  a principle of \ae sthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The
  necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not
  one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is
  something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which
  preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among
  themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the
  really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete
  before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
  supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever
  so slightly, altered; 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. Whoever has approved this
  idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will
  not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the
  present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet
  who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and
  responsibilities. 

  In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be
  judged by the standards of the past. 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. 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. 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. We say: it
  appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears
  individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that
  it is one and not the other. 

  To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the
  poet to the past: 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. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an
  important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and
  highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the
  main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most
  distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious
  fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never
  quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe---the mind of
  his own country---a mind which he learns in time to be much more
  important than his own private mind---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. That this development,
  refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point
  of view of the artist, any 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 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. 

  Some one said: ``The dead writers are remote from us because we know
  so much more than they did.'' Precisely, and they are that which we
  know. 

  I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my
  programme for the m\'etier of poetry. The objection is that the
  doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), 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. What is to be insisted
  upon 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. 

  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. 

  There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its
  relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization
  that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall,
  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. 


\section{}

  Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the
  poet but upon the poetry. 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. In the last article I 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. The other aspect
  of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to
  its author. 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 a more finely perfected
  medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to
  enter into new combinations. 

  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. The mind of the poet is
  the shred of platinum. 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. 

  The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the
  presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions
  and feelings. 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. 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. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any
  emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the
  \emph{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. 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. 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. 

  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. 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. 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 no more intense, furthermore, than
  Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct
  dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process
  of transmution 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. In the \emph{Agamemnon}, the artistic
  emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in
  Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the
  difference between art and the event is always absolute; 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. 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. 

  The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related
  to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: 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. 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. 

  I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded
  with fresh attention in the light---or darkness---of these observations:

\begin{verse}
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?\dots
\end{verse}

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is
a combination of 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. This
balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which
the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to
it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the
drama. 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. 

  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. His particular emotions may be simple, or
  crude, or flat. 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. 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. 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. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn
  as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that
  ``emotion recollected in tranquillity'' is an inexact formula. For it
  is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of
  meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, 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. 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. 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. But, of course, only
  those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want
  to escape from these things. 

\section{}

\begin{center}
  o d\`e no\^us \'\i s\=os thei\'oter\'on ti ka\`i apath\'es estin
\end{center}

  This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or
  mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can
  be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. 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
  are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in
  verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate
  technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of
  significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not
  in the history of the poet. 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. 

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