Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Eliot attempts to provide two important insights to poetry in this essay. He first gives a new definition to “tradition” by stressing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry. He then goes on to argue that poetry should be mainly “impersonal,” and detached from the personality or bias of its writer. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complicated and unusual, This view, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary, not just the present  times or literature of the history in his or her country. Thus, the poet must be in touch with the mindset of all Europe in its past and presents days in order to create Eliot’s idea of traditionally sound poetry. In Eliot’s second point he applies a “self-sacrifice” aspect to this special awareness of the past. This self-sacrificial point he makes refers to cutting your personality completely out of your writing. Once this mindfulness is achieved, it be rids any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has separated himself from personal experience and opinion and will now only write true historically correct expression. For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the individual life of the artist but is rather the result of a greater ability to fuse impersonal writing with accurate and historically correct writing with the ability to still maintain true aesthetic, artistic and poetic characteristics within itself. This however, he explains is an ability derived from deep comprehensive knowledge.

In response to Eliot I would question his position on what he believes is “real poetry.” I would ask him, what he thinks sets apart these impersonal recordings he explained from a historical documentation? If real poetry has to be from deep comprehensive study of past European cultures, and separated from any personality or character, what makes it so beautiful? Is it even considered an art, or just a recorded form of writing? I would argue the point of writing is like Wordworth’s view. It is more to express feelings of personal experience. Poetry is a way to express thoughts in a beautiful form of literature; it is supposed to be personal and relatable, not impersonal and historically sound. The concept of poetry Eliot describes defeats the whole artistic point of poetry in my mind.