Tradition and the individual talent

Seamus Heaney in his 'Finders Keepers' talks lovingly and reverentially of T S Eliot. Reminded and inspired, I too spend my hours with Eliot's Collected Poems. And the desire and need to read more from and about Eliot. Looking up 'Joy of Reading', Charles Von Doren suggests reading certain poems and prose by Eliot, esp "Tradition and the Individual Talent". This can be found in 'The Sacred Wood'.Here. 

This essay prompts its own response. A simple one, that is noting this down some lines this post and perhaps reviving this blog.

Some lines from the essay:

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 positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may 44call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; 45and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

Reading this, a tangential response. From my narrow point of view, this, that considering an artist or writer in a historical chain, is perhaps one way to consider the whole thing. Perhaps other way to look at it is that all great writing resonates with a few simple truths that shine through them in myriad details and complexities. Perhaps there are a few simple truths to begin with, and each great writer discovers again and again the same fountain that feeds all spirit. 

Eliot puts it beautifully in four quartets:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The other problem or conundrum or curiosity or existential matter that he seems to grapple with which finds voice in his poems too is the intersection of temporal with the timeless. A beautiful poem seems to create a timeless space in our temporality. Perhaps the good fortune of finding timelessness in temporality - is the good fortune of any reader.

And again, from Four Quartets:

...But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. ...

 And further:

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

**

Unrelated note. Some books, essays or poems are like verbs. While reading, they seem to create a space which one seems to enter, a state, just the way the words have been threaded together by the poet or the writer. After reading, I don’t seem to remember a lot from them except perhaps sharpening of a sense or some feeling stays which is enveloping. Like a verb then - it is in the act of reading them - the state of reading, rather than any retention of what is read. Perhaps one changes while reading them rather than carry away words from them. As Eliot would perhaps say, the husk of meaning, in changing, fulfilling. If some writings behave like verbs, perhaps Eliot's poems are an atmosphere of their own. 

**

Back to the blog. I hope to read with same verve the crumbs of great writing that come my way; my personal desires are still the same, to prolong my time with such crumbs, by reading on them, around them, about them: the joys and delights of good writing. And hopefully sharing it here. To any kindred with kindled.