Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Where is the talent?

In the first part of the excerpt from Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot writes: "In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence." Here, he acts as a critic on the relationship between poet and tradition. My question once I read that first line was, well how can Eliot expect poetry to evolve if everyone just follows the "norms" of their predecessors? This issue was cleared up when he wrote: "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 be positively discouraged." He's saying that we need to see and know what happened in poetry's past, but we should not copy it. Rather, he feels that the best work is where past poets' influence "assert their immortality most vigorously."

In the second part of the excerpt, Eliot focuses more on emotions in poetry. The sentences that really got me thinking-- "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." The only way this makes sense in my head would be to mean that poets need to write poems that aren't too personal or too emotionally specific to just themselves, so that way everyone can relate to it and it becomes timeless. Or is that too much of a stretch?

And one more thing... I found the title misleading. There is no mention of talent.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, I think you're right here at the end. You must know what suffering is, but then you must write somehow beyond that individual pain. If you write with a sense of the tradition, Eliot believes, you may come closer to that ideal. On the other hand, if you look at Eliot's actual poetry, he's not all that distant, is he?

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