Pièces d'identité: T. S. Eliot, J. W. N. Sullivan and Poetic Impersonality

Pièces d'identité: T. S. Eliot, J. W. N. Sullivan and Poetic Impersonality Michael Whitworth University of Wales, Bangor DEVELOPMENTS IN THE ARTS and the sciences were affected in two ways by the First World War, being simultaneously stimulated and delayed. As a result, 1919 saw a sudden poppy-like flowering in both fields. In April, it saw John Middleton MuTTy1S revival of the Athenaeum, which, until its demise in 1921, was to provide an important forum for reviews and articles of a modernist tendency. It saw the testing of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in May, and the announcement of the results in November. It saw T. S. Eliot developing his ideas about the rôles of the poet and of tradition, and it saw him planning The Waste Land. This article will trace the connections between Eliot's ideas and those of his contemporaries, focusing on the role of J. W. N. Sullivan (1886-1937), scientific journalist, deputy editor of the Athenaeum, associate of Murry and Eliot, and a man well placed to mediate between the arts and the sciences. Eliot's identity as a critic, it will suggest, was sustained and confirmed by his contemporaries through a sequence of borrowings and coterie allusions. Though T. S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) has been widely anthologised, and has been highly influential in considerations of his work, it is less widely known that Eliot touched on the same issues in several contemporaneous essays, and in particular, in the lecture "Modern Tendencies in Poetry."1 Tradition" was reprinted in The Sacred Wood (1920) and the Selected Essays (1932). Tendencies" was first published in an obscure Indian journal by the name of Shama'a, and has never been reprinted. The relative accessibility of Tradition" has led to its position as the single most important item in Eliot's prose oeuvre, a key text in relation to The Waste Land and the 149 ELT 39:2 1996 whole of modernist literature. The lecture considers the same issues as the essay: poetic impersonality, the role of tradition, the poet's individuality , and the simultaneous presence of past literatures. Like the essay, the lecture deploys the striking image of the catalyst to encapsulate these themes. It may be that its very similarity, combined with its inaccessibility, has led to its neglect: the few critics to comment on Tendencies" have considered it only as a supplement to the better-known essay; for example, Gail McDonald mentions it only as a "gloss" on Tradition."2 Other writers have based their discussions of Eliot's theorising on the better-known piece.3 Much of the criticism written on "Tradition" is relevant to Tendencies," but there are issues of importance which only a reading of the lecture can clarify. Those critics who have commented on the relation of impersonality to science have focused almost exclusively on the image of the catalyst; those who have attempted to relate Tradition" to the ideas of other writers have reached backwards and forwards in time, but have overlooked the immediate context of the journals to which Eliot regularly contributed.4 I will argue here that Tendencies", when placed in its 1919 context, could be considered the more important piece. It allows us to recognise how much Eliot's concern with impersonality and simultaneity shared with, and perhaps derived from, the intellectual ferment of his time. Observing and stirring that intellectual ferment was John Middleton Murry^s Athenaeum. The journal had been bought early in 1919 by Arthur Rowntree, who had appointed Murry as editor.6 Murry in turn had appointed as his assistant J. W. N. Sullivan. Sullivan, often misrepresented as an "Irish scientist," was born in Poplar, London, of Irish parents, and was a journalist. He had left school at fourteen, but took part-time courses in science at the Northern Polytechnic Institute and at University College London.6 By 1915 he was established as a journalist at home equally in literature and science. Murry^ appointment of a scientifically-literate journalist was to prove fortunate: 1919 was to be the year of Einstein. Einstein had formulated his special theory of relativity in 1905, and the general...