Summary: T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Editor’s Note: For this assignment, I needed to read and summarize the published piece or content listed below, and then provide a response or assessment of the writing.
Summary
Eliot’s essay emphasizes two main points: in order for an artist to be modern within their time, they must be knowledgeable of and incorporate the “dead poets” of the past into their work; and poetry does not require a piece of the author’s personality, but rather, it requires the author outright removing their personality from their work. Eliot’s stress on the importance of tradition stems from his belief that an artist cannot be judged without a benchmark of previous artists’ work, stating, “You cannot value him [the artist] alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Additionally, Eliot stated that it is the author’s responsibility to develop his work through a temporal understanding of past artists, their work, and the progression of art through the years, calling an artist’s development a “continual extinction of personality.” This extinction of personality leads to Eliot’s second point, which is that poets should not include their personality in their work. A poet’s work is not a forum for detailing the poet’s experiences; a poet’s work is an opportunity for the poet to create an experience for the audience through text, not retelling of personal emotions or events. Contrary to what many poets and critics believed, Eliot not only believed but stressed that “…the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates…” Eliot closed his essay by stating “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”—and it is an escape that a true poet can only know when they have embraced the past, the present, and the past’s influence on the present.
Response
Eliot’s essay seemed odd to me as it pertained to the impersonality of poetry. First, as far back as I can recall, whenever I studied poetry, emotion was one of the main points of focus. Teachers stressed an analysis of what the author was feeling and how they tried to make the audience understand their feelings. Poetry was always presented to me as an explosion of feeling. Second, I thoroughly disagree with Eliot’s claim that an author is more perfect when their personality is removed from their work. I think it is impossible for an author to completely remove his personality from their work. Environment, events—social, political, economic—and the people in an author’s life have all been shown to influence an author, and that influence makes its way into an author’s writing, whether consciously or subconsciously.
I’d like to see the work of a few poets who admittedly followed Eliot’s school of thought and tried to write free from personality and personal influences. I’d like to see their work, as well as historical and biographical information about the authors. After analyzing their work, their personal history, and environmental factors of their time, I’d like to see how that work fares against Eliot’s definition of a more perfect poet.
In the meantime, I will reread some of Eliot’s work with eye toward the impersonal and a focus on how his work makes me feel, what type of experience or emotion he creates for his audience, and if he is successful.