Modernism and T. S. Eliot

The appearance in 2015 of a new edition of Eliot's complete poems, with its staggeringly detailed commentary, was an invitation to ponder once more the major contribution he made to what became known in academic circles as modernism. It was the Nobel laureate Peter Medawar who once wondered whether 'doctrinaire psychoanalysis' was not perhaps 'the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century'.¹ Anyone who proposed modernism as a strong candidate for second place would need to remember that having ideas that turn out to be false does not in itself make someone a confidence trickster. Only if the manner in which they are set out, and urged on the public, involves some degree of self-interest and deception might such a harsh term begin to seem justified.

Modernism in Britain was crucially dependent of a number of ideas Eliot put forward in the years immediately following the First World War. The most well-known of these is the notion that 'the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates'.² The impersonality of great art appears to have been very much in the air as Eliot was making his mark. In one of the essays in the collection he called The Sacred Wood, published in 1920, he quotes with approval an obscure French critic who had written that 'there is a literary beauty which is in some ways impersonal and perfectly distinct from the make-up of the author himself'.³ As far as the specifically English context is concerned, Eliot's attitude could be seen as a response to a way of thinking that can be traced back to the preface to Lyrical Ballads, in which it is assumed that poets are people of powerful and interesting feelings, so that the more powerful and interesting those feelings are, the better poets they will be. This deflection away from the problems of composition no doubt gave rise to much artless self-expression, but if this is the tendency against which Eliot is protesting, his response to it is peculiar and extreme. 'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion', he writes in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', the essay where most of his most frequently quoted formulations about impersonality appear, and that is no doubt quite true; yet it is a surprise to find him continuing immediately with 'but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality' (the repetition of 'escape' saves any commentator who finds the eyebrows lifting from having to put that word in italics). The impression here of inadvertent self-revelation is not lessened by Eliot ending this section of his essay with the foppish: 'But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things' (SE, p. 21).

The progress of the real artist involves what in Eliot's view is 'a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality', and to help his reader conceive the creative mind of such a person he famously compares it to the filament of platinum which is the catalyst when oxygen and sulphur dioxide come together to produce sulphurous acid but remains itself 'inert, neutral and unchanged' (p. 18). Asking how such a strange analogy came to be so successful is almost as puzzling as wondering why Freud's theory of penis envy should have once enjoyed so much success, although it is only fair to point out that Eliot himself was inclined to find the way in which some of his early ideas about literature caught on embarrassing, and that he later modified many of them. An important factor in their catching on so quickly, however, is what he himself, in the preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood, referred to as 'an assumption of pontifical solemnity'. Certainly he is able to adopt an air of authority quite alien to, for example, Virginia Woolf's suggestion in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown that 'on or about December 1910 human...