T. S. Eliot, Tradition, and Phylogenesis

Eliot's important essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has been roundly criticized because it actively deplores the one thing that so many people see as the purpose of poetry: to express one's emotions. Eliot insists that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past." This consciousness of the past comes at the expense of the poet's consciousness of self: "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

A close examination of the essay, however, reveals that this "extinction" is complicated. Of what is the poem comprised if not the poet's personality? Eliot suggests that poetry is made of the "pressure" that fuses feelings into emotions: "For it is not the 'greatness', the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Poetry is the combination of disparate impressions and experiences, rather than the expression of emotion.

I'm intrigued by the distinction made here between feelings and emotions. We tend to think of these as synonyms for one another, but Eliot sees the former as separate "floating" processes and the latter as unified under the poet's personality. The concept being disparaged here is "unity." The act of poetry has something to do with the dissolution of the order imposed on the world by the ego. Poetry, as Eliot thinks of it, is meant to dissolve the ego itself.

But it is not just this negative project; it also is a sort of assembly. Poetry is "a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences [...]; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation." In other words, poetry is the new experience of experiences, not the distorted unification of emotion expressed by the poet's ego.

This, of course, is Freudian language. Eliot seems to advance a notion of poetry in which one sees through the productions of the ego for the unconscious impressions and experiences underneath. But Eliot does not seem interested in advocating a celebration of the id, either. It's important to note that his discussion takes place in an essay on both tradition and poetry. This means, first of all, that he doesn't merely substitute a physiological self of seething drives for the unified ego. Instead of glorifying selfish drives, he invokes the "tradition" of history. We do not exist as beings in a simple present; rather, our present is layered over by the successive waves of the past. Our drives are not our own, but have instead been received at the species level. This combination of drives and history evokes Freud's concept of phylogenetic drives that exist as a part of the transmission of culture. Eliot tries to recover this inheritance that has been too vigorously denied by that precious construct, the individual ego.

A second and related issue is that the process of poetry does not celebrate an eruption of drives in real life, or even an understanding of drives through their phylogenetic recovery. Instead, the process Eliot describes is an aesthetic one. He writes: "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suffer as individuals, but the artistic project requires a suspension of the self that allows us access to greater combinations. Eliot references Keats's "Ode on a Nightingale" as a poem that operates not by the expression of the poet's emotion or the actual experience of viewing nightingales; instead, it operates through the productive intersection of separate "feelings" brought together in the words and images comprising the poem.

I find in these two connected perspectives an emphasis on a collective unconscious of images and experiences phylogenetically deposited in the modern subject who might aesthetically recover this inheritance through the contemplation of poetry. At the very least, Eliot's essay should be seen as more than a simple veneration of the English canon.