Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on Tradition and Poetry)

“[I]f 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.”—American-born English Nobel Literature laureate T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), “Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (1975)

Disruption, we have been told endlessly by self-promoting tech titans, is the spirit of the age. Look around you, in business and politics, to understand the wreckage involved in that philosophy.

In the 20^th century, there may have been no greater disruption than World War I. I don’t think that it’s coincidental that its aftermath saw the publication of what Robert Crawford, in his 2015 biography Young Eliot, termed his subject’s “greatest manifesto, his ‘programme for the métier of poetry.’”

This passing year marks the centennial of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a groundbreaking piece of literary criticism that appeared in the September and December 1919 issues of The Egoist. In it, T.S. Eliot argued that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” His second point was more problematic: that a poet should be “impersonal,” acting, in effect, as a “receptacle” of past images, phrases and feelings so as to create “a new art emotion.”

The extent to which Eliot himself could be “impersonal” in his work is debatable, as Crawford outlines in some detail. But he certainly would use his feelings about tradition in a time of displacement as he shortly began to work on The Waste Land, perhaps the keystone of modernist poetry.