Eliot's Standing on top of Dead People!: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in Eliot's Early Poems

Of the poems we were assigned, “Preludes” seems to be incongruent with the others. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady”and“La Figlia che Piange” deal with different types of love. There is the middle aged lust of “…Prufrock,” the budding friendship of “Portrait…,” and the broken heartedness of “La Figlia…” “Preludes,” on the other hand, deals with an undefined sin, evidenced by the “sordid images” and “soiled hands.” The poem explores the morning after a night of decadence and debauchery as the subject recovers from a night of drinking and begins to remember what transpired and possibly recognize the condemnation of his soul.

Some of the common features of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “La Figlia che Piange” are that they bear epigraphs of great writers. Eliot leans on “the dead poets, his ancestors,” Virgil, Marlowe, and Dante, to add more depth to his poems. This refers back to “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the first section of which focuses on the involvement that dead poets have in influencing living poets. With these poems, he emphasizes his assertion that no work is completely individual. He says, “…we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a writer’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Thus, Eliot avows his deftness by incorporating some of his great forerunners.

Prufrock and Other Observations begins with a dedication to Jean Verdenal, who died two years before the first edition was published. The epigraph is of Virgil speaking to Status in Dante’s Purgatorio saying, “Now canst thou the sum of love which warms me to thee comprehend, when this our vanity I disremember, treating a shadow as substantial thing” (Canto XXI, 133-136).

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with Dante’s The Inferno. “If I believed that my answer were to a person who should ever return to the world, this flame would stand without further movement; but since never one returns alive from this deep, if I hear true, I answer you without fear of infamy” (Canto XXVII, 60-66). Eliot’s poems actually deals with a middle aged man’s insecurity, which calls for such absolute secrecy as found in Dante. According to Eliot’s essay “Hamlet” and James Torrens’s “Eliot’s Essays: A Bridge to the Poems,” Eliot not only stands on the shoulders of Dante but gets a boost from Shakespeare’s, as well. He forms the Prufrock character as a combination of Hamlet, who is older and “overmature in thoughts” and Polonius, who is also an older man but is immature. This creates an internal conflict in the poem between Prufrock’s mature age and his youthful, lusty ambitions.

“Portrait of a Lady” pulls its title from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and bares an epigraph extracted from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta. It reads, “Thou hast committed—/ Fornication; but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead.” Similar to the dexterity Eliot shows in “…Prufrock,” “Portrait…” incorporates Jamesian elements and Marlowian conflict into this poem.

“La Figlia che Piange,” which means “The Weeping Girl” looks back to Virgil’s The Aeneid for its epigraph, “O, how am I to speak of you, maiden?” Eliot chooses to speak of this maiden in the same manner that a play director or playwright would. He describes and defines her through a series of commands or directions.

Is T.S. Eliot Confused or am I?: Ambivalence in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

In the first section of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” it seems as though Eliot espouses the development of skill in a poet. He harps on the value of the past, tradition, previous writers, and so on as essential to the present and the contemporary writer’s approach to composing poetry. He says, “the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.” One may read this as a loyalty to the canon, in which case the poet adopts and develops the former ideas and strategies of “existing monuments”; however, I rather read the statement as a plea for the poet to load her technical composition arsenal. An inventor who uses her knowledge of the wheel will theoretically be much more successful that an inventor who rejects all prior knowledge, thus working to reinvent already established devices. Likewise, I think that Eliot emphasizes the importance of studying poets who have established successful careers, so that these new poet may learn and employ already developed and perfected forms and strategies to achieve a certain effect.

This idea substantiates the value of skill in poetry over the often too prevalent notion of expression. However, this knowledge of, respect for, and incorporation of tradition in the first section of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is lost as the essay moves toward the second and third sections. As I read these sections, I found myself asking Eliot, “Why must the poet always feel? Why can he never think?” Eliot insists that the poet, in order to be of poetic value, must lose his mind and personality, which I would argue gives the poet her uniqueness. He believes that she must reject any natural emotion so that she may create a “significant” artistic emotion. She must surrender her personality, which involves personal history and makes the art personal. He intimates, “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.” So is the best writing process, according to Eliot, the act of repressing the self and emotions? No wonder so many poets were depressed, died young, or committed suicide. That’s a lot of stress!

In this portion, Eliot also gives the example of a filament of platinum being the catalyst for oxygen and sulphur dioxide. The platinum represents the poet’s mind and the gases represent the “numberless feelings, phrases, images” which float around in the poet’s head “until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” As you so aptly noted in your 1984 response, Dr. Sparks, this analogy is very problematic for the modern reader. Aside from the feminist reading of the phallic filament, Eliot forces his ideal poet into a powerless position. The poet can only create the right conditions and hope for a reaction. The creative process becomes “involuntary, unconscious,…automatic [and a] mechanical creation…” (Sparks). This idea contradicts the reverence for tradition and the “monuments” as the teacher of skill and, worse, Eliot never resolves or unifies this conflict.

I wholly expected a dramatic unification at the conclusion of Eliot’s essay, but instead I was left with ambivalent and oppositional logic, rather than emotions, floating around in my head. Though there are some golden nuggets in this essay, each reader must decide which nugget will most benefit her because of the problematic nature of this beast. However, I must point out that if this duality worked for Eliot, there must be some artistic value in his composition techniques.

What is Modernism

Describing Modernism
What We Know
Well, as far as I can tell, no one really knows what Modernism is. There is no specific definitive description for Modernism, mainly because the practice was very different in each area of interest and also because the artists who built and defined Modern did so as a means of exclusion (Levenson 1). Therein lies an essentially problematic definition for Post-Modernism, but that is a blog for another time.

The Basics
Modernism occurs in many different countries between 1890 and 1939, which is the beginning of World War II. (For our purposes, I will limit myself to Europe and the United States.) It penetrates various aspects of study, performance, and art, each in a unique way. In general, Modernism describes the reaction to traditional forms, ideas, and styles in art (philosophy, film, literature, paintings, pottery, décor, etc.) and architecture. Even Modernist literature—poetry, novel, and drama—is not altogether identical, with respect to technique, purpose, effect, etc. Nevertheless, there are some overarching congruencies.

Themes
Unlike l’art pour l’art and the Decadence Movement, Modernism is a reaction against all oppressive forces. For Modernists, the tyrant wears many masks—that of the “the Editor, the Lady, the Public, the Banker, the Democrat” (Levenson 2) and Modernists writers use creativity to inflict riotous violence upon these oppressors.

Strategies
In order to transform restrictive political, social, domestic, and religious foundations, Modernist writers commonly use a few particular strategies in their writing: fragmentation, “mythic paradigms,” subverting traditional standards of beauty, and “radical linguistic experiment” (Levenson 3). Fragmenting aspects of literature and pictorial art deals with establishing oppositions within the art.

Modernists also focus on technique for both the piece of art and everything associated with that particular piece of art. They ask, “How does this part represent the whole?” For example, what does the cover illustration say about the book? How do the stage curtains propel or hinder the message of a play?

Irony is also heavily relied upon in Modernist literature. Text such as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler attest to the ampleness of irony in the literature and the intention of uncovering and exaggerating some widely accepted but actually ridiculous contemporary occurrence.

Subjects
Modernist writers often write with the goal of “social modernization” or social reform in mind, so central subjects in Modern literature are commonly industry, war, women’s rights, Irish equality, imperialism, labor conditions, relativism, and fakery (Levenson 4). In their work, one will also find heavy political angst, a sense of alienation, debase morality, nihilism and cynical questioning of religion, morals, government, certain individuals, the self, and humanity.

Mood
Radical

Intent
Modernist writers intended to “startle and disturb the public” (Levenson 3) in order to invoke a crisis. They wanted to move other artists to adopt their belief system, move the public to strong discontentment with current affairs, and to cause a reevaluation of social, political, domestic, and religious conditions.


Who’s Who of Modern Artists
Literature
Samuel Beckett
James Joyce
Andre Gide
Franz Kafka
Gertrude Stein

Visual Art
Pablo Picasso
Henri Matisse
Paul Klee
Edvard Munch
Jacob Epstein

Philosophy/Science
Albert Einstein
Sigmund Freud
Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen
Guglielmo Marconi

Music
Gustave Mahler
Arnold Schonberg
Frederic Francois Chopin
Giacomo Puccini

Performance Art
Igor Stravinsky

Film
Edwin S. Porter
Cecil B. de Mille
D.W. Griffith
Robert Weine
Charles Chaplin



A Brief Timeline

I. OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH
a. Ovid
b. Chaucer
c. Renaissance
d. Shakespeare
II. NEOCLASSICAL
a. Restoration and the 18th Century
b. Milton
c. Johnson
III. ROMANTIC
a. Blake
b. Keats
IV. VICTORIAN
a. Bronte
b. Whitman
V. MODERN
a. Contemporary Literature
b. Harlem Renaissance
c. Avant-Garde
d. Wilde
e. Chekhov
f. Woolf
g. Eliot
VI. POST-MODERN