116 I Criticism in the twentieth century
Eliot and the idea of tradition I 117
quotations from and allusions to an extraordinary range of European authors, signifies a
recognition that that self never had 'his complete meaning alone'. The poet here 'set[s]
him[self] ... amqng the dead', in the words of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'; but
even as he does so, he forges a new creation and a new identity out of his literary
tradition. The ghost-poet, existing in the shady area between potentiality and actuality
('"What! are you here?" I Although we were not'), suspended in a moment out of time
'Between two worlds', affords 'aftersight and foresight' and the apprehension of a self-
transcending 'extinction of personality' (and here in 'Little Gidding' the process is given
a specifically Christian perspective). As the poet's double, the ghost represents both the
self-recognition and the 'self-sacrifice' that are necessary for the formation of the trad-
ition. 'Both one and many' 1 the ghost is the one, unified tradition and the many
individual poets who compose that tradition. The ghost reconciles tradition and the
individual talent.
After World War II, and particularly in North America, there was a general move away
from the symbolic modes of writing associated with Modernism and the New Criticism.
The example of the so-called confessional poets is instructive. Both Robert Lowell and
John Berryman began their careers under the auspices of the New Criticism, and both
moved away from its Eliotic emphasis on textual autonomy and impersonality. Berry-
man's Dream Songs can be read as a continuous drama between a desire for impersonality,
to disappear into the poem, and exhibitionism, a desire to confess. Lowell's early,
strenuously metrical and symbolically organized poetry gave way in 'Life Studies' to a
personal, free or loosely metrical, metonymic style that captures the movement of
the poet's mind in the act of recollection. Significantly, the example of Eliot's contem-
porary, William Carlos Williams, was decisive in Lowell's change of direction, for
Williams had always been opposed to Eliot's agenda: 'Critically Eliot returned us to
the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to
matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself-rooted in the locality which
should give it fruit.' 9 Williams's lifelong ambition to establish a poetics grounded in the
local, particular, and immediate, as opposed to Eliot's bookish, more abstract culture of
the mind, had a delayed but profound effect, pre-eminently in North America in the
1950s among the Black Mountain poets under the leadership of Charles Olson. Olson's
1950 manifesto 'Projective Verse' proposes an 'open form' poetics, 'composition by field,
as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form'-that is to say, the closed form
and autonomous structure associated with the New Criticism. 10 This immanentist
poetics of presence, in which to define one's environment is to define the self, is
informed by a Heideggerian epistemology of being-in-the-world, and is antipathetic to
Eliot's Bradleyan epistemology, which tends to set the individual in opposition to his or
her environment.
T. S.
FURTHER READING
Works by Eliot
Selected Prose ofT. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). An excellent introduc-
tion to Eliot's literary criticism, this selection includes four of the essays by Eliot referred to in the
present chapter: 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 'The Metaphysical Poets', 'What is a
Classic?', and 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth'. It also contains less extensive selections from Eliot's
social and religious criticism, including extracts from the two works referred to in this chapter: The
Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture.
The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), repr. in
Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, n.d.). These two works (reissued here in a single volume)
contain the essence of Eliot's socio-religious thought, which developed out of his idea of a
(literary) tradition.
Works by other authors
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety ofInfluence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
This book outlines the basis for Bloom's influential and still controversial theory of antagonistic
literary influence, which was developed in several subsequent books by Bloom. Though Bloom
regarded his idea of tradition as opposed to Eliot's, as the present chapter shows, his theory is
arguably continuous with Eliot's.
Ellmann, Maud, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1987). This book contains a very readable deconstructive account of Eliot, especially of 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent'.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (London: Sheed
& Ward, 1975). This book is an important text in the development of reader-response and
reception theory, which, as the present chapter maintains, has its roots in Eliot's idea of tradition.
Jay, Gregory s., T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983). It is now firmly established that Eliot's poetry was more influenced by
Romantic poetry than he acknowledged or than was generally understood. This book and Edward
Lobb's T. s. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (see below) demonstrate that Eliot's critical
thought likewise continued (rather than opposed, as Eliot maintained) Romanticism.
Kermode, Frank, The Classic (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). This stimulating book, which takes as its
starting-point Eliot's thinking about 'the classic' and literary tradition, demonstrates how import-
ant and fertile that thinking can still be. Kermode considers writers as diverse as Andrew Marvell
and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and ends with a reading of Wuthering Heights in the light of his
theoretical speculations.
Lobb, Edward, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1981). See above
under Jay.
Moody, A. David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994). This collection of essays comprises a useful undergraduate handbook for the study of
all aspects of Eliot's work, literary, critical, philosophical, theoretical, social, and religious. It
includes the essay referred to in the present chapter: Bernard Sharratt's 'Eliot: Modernism, Post-
modernism, and After'.