T. S. Eliot and the Essay

6 “Restoring / With a New Verse the Ancient Rhyme”

81 = 6 “Restoring / With a New Verse the Ancient Rhyme” It may seem odd, in a book on Eliot and the essay, to discuss his poetry. But I offer no apology, only the claim that his poetry and his essays should not be separated. Perhaps more so than is often acknowledged or realized, they complement one another, neither acting primary to the other’s secondary, although the matter of artistic value is never in question.To borrow for the moment from Wordsworth, in terms of understanding Eliot their relation is one of “interchangeable supremacy” and “mutual domination,” each helpful but not determinative in comprehending the other. I turn first to Ash-Wednesday, one of the two principal poetic guides to an understanding of Eliot and the essay. The other is Four Quartets, which also happens to be an essay. The words I have borrowed from Ash-Wednesday for my title resonate especially with Eliot’s poetry, but they also point to the earlier, great essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” One concern dominates the early poems and the essays, linking them inseparably: the matter of the new and the traditional. Perhaps the most famous if not also the most important of all his essays focuses this issue neatly and forcefully. Here, as we have seen, Eliot struggles to define tradition and to establish— restore, really—the relation of the individual to it in the light of Wordsworth’s Romantic revolution. This last is a given, pride of place now resting with the private and the individual, tradition being severely undervalued. Eliot seeks to reclaim tradition, and to do so he understands that he must carefully, even radically , redefine “new.” As always, two sides speak loudly, contentiously, indeed defiantly. In addition to the now-established individualists, there are (the perhaps just as vocal) traditionalists, who would have no more to do with the new than many Romantics and post-Romantics are willing to value old, tried, and 82 T. S. Eliot and the Essay tested ways. The forces lined up may be recognized, in, say, Jonathan Swift’s terms, as the Ancients and the Moderns—incidentally the title Eliot chose for his 1936 collection of essays that “replaced” his 1928 essays titled For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. Order is the issue, as well as style. In “Tradition and the IndividualTalent,” Eliot attempts to restore attention to “the historical sense,” which, he says, “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” That understanding, as crucial as it is demanding, Eliot continues, “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.” The issue is therefore joined that will occupy Eliot throughout his career: the relation of time and the timeless. Here he writes, “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” (44). Although he apparently does not, at this point, grasp its full significance, Eliot is essaying toward the notion of Incarnation, a sense of pattern already strong and compelling if inchoate. From this point Eliot proceeds to claim that “[n]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” What matters is “his relation to the dead poets and artists” (44), a point that Wordsworth’s epigone Geoffrey Hartman misses in minimizing Eliot, as we have seen, in Criticism in the Wilderness. The idea of relation necessarily raises the question of conformity, which Eliot next discusses, turning his acute eye upon the “thorough-going” traditionalists as he has done on the “thorough-going” individualists, Romantics , and Moderns: 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; and so the relations, proportions...