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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tradition and the Individual Talent, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Past, Present, and Tradition
Emotion, Art, and Impersonality
Individuality, Novelty, and Conformity
Summary
Analysis
Eliot asserts that readers should criticize and appreciate poems, not the poets who wrote them. One hears of lots of poets, but rarely finds a true poem. In Eliot’s “Impersonal” theory, every poem is a “living whole” of all the poetry ever written; in this theory, it’s also important to note the relation of the poem to its author. In the case of a mature poet, the poet’s mind is not profound because they are more interesting or have a greater “personality,” but because they are able to combine feelings in new ways.
Eliot introduces his Impersonal Theory, which depicts the poet as an instrument for a cause that is separate from their own personal causes. Since poetry is a “living whole” of all poetry, the poet is simply a tool well-designed for recombining old feelings into new ones. Eliot suggests that the mature poet doesn’t have a high opinion of themselves. A poet who thought they were great because of their personality would more likely be immature and full of themselves.
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Eliot returns to his analogy of the platinum. When platinum is present, oxygen and sulphur dioxide combine to form sulphurous acid. Without the platinum, this process would not occur, but the resulting sulphurous acid has no platinum in it. Also, the platinum itself doesn’t change. In Eliot’s analogy, the platinum is the poet. In the perfect poet, the creative part of the mind is entirely separate from the part that experiences and feels. If these are separate, the creative mind will better be able to craft the passions (its material) into works of art.
The platinum catalyzes sulphur dioxide and oxygen to combine into sulfuric acid, and platinum is not present in the resulting acid. By analogy, the poet causes new arrangements of feelings to occur in their poems without involving their personal lives. Eliot argues that a kind of compartmentalizing in the artist is desirable. With this separation, the artist can apply their creative mind to passions, instead of having their passions and creativity all mixed up together.
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In Eliot’s analogy, experiences are the elements that transform in the presence of the platinum. But the experience one has of a work of art is not at all like any other experiences. The effect of a piece of art could be made up of one emotion or several, or of various feelings. The last quatrain of Canto XV in the Inferno creates an effect—a feeling—which was only appropriate for the poet to add after the perfect combination of detail he constructed leading up to it. The poet’s mind collects images and feelings and keeps them until they have all the components for a new combination.
Eliot imagines the emotional effects of poetry as fabrics made up of many threads of detail and feeling. These poetic emotions are inherently different from life’s emotions because life’s emotions aren’t complex constructions in the same way. With his example from Dante’s Inferno, Eliot shows that feelings can actually be created by poetry and thereby suggests that the poet is not someone who has unusual feelings but is someone who is a good craftsman of new ones.
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Eliot points out that there are countless of these combinations. Contrary to what some believe, the combination’s effectiveness has nothing to do with the intensity of the emotions in the combination. Rather, it is due to the intensity of the artist’s process. The intensity of a poem is different from the intensity of the experience it is about. Poems can be equally intense even when the emotion they depend on is not equally so, or they can produce different effects even when they are based on the same emotion. There is an absolute difference between the emotion and the artistic emotion, and the combination used to create the artistic emotion is always complex.
In a poem, the intensity is created by the way feelings are combined, not by the feelings themselves. Again, this is unlike the intensity of life in which a person feels the intensity of the feeling, not its creation. Eliot seems to be implying that poetry should not attempt to mimic or express experience but rather it should create an experience. It does this by taking feelings and phrases and recombining them to create new effects of standard emotions.
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Eliot says that the poet is not a personality, but that their mind is a medium in which experiences cohere in new ways. This is like the idea that the human soul is a “substantial unity.” Sometimes, the poet’s personal experiences will have no bearing on their poetry; likewise, their poetry might have very little effect on their personal self.
Eliot likens the poet’s mind to the “substantial unity” of the human soul. This illustrates the poet’s mind as somehow cohering feelings into a unity. They only have the ability to perform this coherence; poets are not themselves a unity of unique feelings.
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Eliot examines a passage that combines negative and positive emotions. On the one hand, the poem expresses attraction to beauty; on the other hand, it expresses an attraction to an ugliness that negates that beauty. Eliot shows that the situation (the events of the play the passage is an excerpt of) that called for this combination of emotions is not enough to explain its full effect. Rather, the poem’s full effect results from the feelings related to the emotion being combined in a new way.
When Eliot proves that this excerpt’s intensity does not come from the situation of the play, he shows again that artistic experience is of a different kind than life experience. In life, a person responds emotionally to situations. In poems, the reader responds to the poet’s combination of feelings that put the obvious, situational emotion in a new light.
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Eliot claims that the poet’s personal experiences and emotions do not make the poet notable. The emotions in the traditional poet’s personal life might be boring, but the emotions in their poetry will be complex. It is wrong for the poet to look for new complex experiences in order to enrich their poetry. That would not be novelty; rather, novelty comes from working simple, old emotions into poetry that expresses new feelings. To do this, the traditional poet can use emotions they haven’t had as well as ones they do have.
The poet is an admirable craftsman but not necessarily a remarkable person. Eliot even says that the poet could be boring and inexperienced. This is because poetry, in Eliot’s vision, is not a mouthpiece for life. Rather, it constantly unearths and reconfigures what is old. A poem makes the common feelings exist again in a new form. This takes artistic skill, but not necessarily personal depth.
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Eliot says that poetry comes neither from emotion, nor recollection, nor tranquility. Rather, it is the result of concentration: The poet concentrates many experiences until they finally unite. Mostly, the poet does this unconsciously. However, much of writing is deliberate; bad poets are not deliberate when they should be, or they are too deliberate when they shouldn’t be. In both cases, the poet is too personal. Poetry shouldn’t express emotion and personality but rather escape from them. Ironically, however, it is those with personality and emotion who want this escape.
Eliot says that poetry does not passively come into being, but through concentration, an action that suggests hard work. It’s as if the poet applies heavy pressure to material in order to fuse it into a poem. Eliot repeatedly says that the poet should not be renowned for their personality, but right at the end, he says only those with personality want to escape it. This emphasizes how important it is for the poet to renounce their personality. The surrender of themselves to their work is a key part of the traditional poet’s process.
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