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Unit 30: Eliot-Tradition And Individual Talent...

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the Notes
past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than,
the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in
which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not
really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do
not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—
a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible
judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears
individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither
take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two
private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course
is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and
highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not
at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the
obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must
be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time
to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this
change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either
Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this
development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the
artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the
psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a
complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is
that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s
awareness of itself cannot show.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they
did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know. I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly
part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a
ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of
poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic
sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not
encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine
knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the
still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat
for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the
whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the
consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout
his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is
more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense
of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of
science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes
place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and
sulphur dioxide.
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If
we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that
follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge

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