The Poetic Personality

When I was in high school, one of my favorite textbooks was a Norton Anthology of English Literature. I’ve held onto it in faith that one day I would finish reading it. This past month, for the first time in nearly a decade, I actually opened it again. I could ramble for pages about Wordsworth and Keats and Coleridge, but instead I want to talk about an essay by T.S. Eliot.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

The essay is entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and it deals with what Eliot thinks is the true essence of poetry. Eliot argues that in order to write poetry in its true and highest form, a poet must possess “the historical sense,” an understanding of his place in and contribution to the entire history of his country and culture’s literature, “a sense of the timeless and of the temporal together.”

Eliot goes further still. Poetry in its highest sense, he argues, requires the author to give himself completely in service of this great tradition. He must put tremendous effort, thought, and study into his work, not in order to express his own feelings, but to become the vessel of a higher strain of thought and passion. Poetry involves “a continual surrender of himself… to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

This theory stands in stark contrast to the ideals of romanticism and modern humanism put forward, for instance, by Oscar Wilde, who claims in his “The Critic as Artist” that criticism is the highest form of art because “the highest criticism is a record of one’s own soul… it is concerned simply with oneself,” independent of its subject-matter. According to Eliot, the creative effort is precisely the opposite; we reach its apotheosis not when we truly know ourselves, but when we truly forget ourselves.

Great Poetry

Poets, according to Eliot, are not great because their passions are larger-than-life, as Wilde might argue, but rather because they have displaced their own personhood to make way for something higher which inhabits their work. It is through self-denial and self-sacrifice that the poet achieves true greatness, because when he fully commits to his work, he becomes a vessel for that which transcends the mortal.

In the end, I think I agree with Eliot. When I read Eliot, or Yeats, or Coleridge, or Tennyson, or Wordsworth, I feel the beauty of their words stir my soul. But it is not their passion itself that stirs me; it is rather the recognition of the same passion in my own breast. We share a common pining, a common memory of and yearning for something we cannot quite put into words.

C. S. Lewis called it sehnsucht – an unutterable longing for something beyond. For me, these poets are great not because they themselves contained that beyond, but because they so poignantly depicted our joint yen for it. It is that mystical beyond, and their willingness to search and sacrifice for it, that gives their work meaning and value.

The Beyond

You might think this is beginning to sound familiar. We are not enough to satisfy ourselves; we yearn for something higher. There is in every man’s soul a hankering back for Eden, a forlorn search for Heaven, a sense of bewilderment and abandonment that comes from being out of right relation with the universe and its maker. We cannot solve this by waxing eloquent about what we have lost; we must instead seek to return to it. There is only one way back, and it does, indeed, require continual self-sacrifice and extinction of self.

This need for continual dedication, Eliot says, is why so few men become great poets: they are simply not willing to put in the work, or they are so busy looking within themselves for greatness that they miss the wonder waiting to be channeled through them from above. Perhaps this is also why so few men make a real difference in history – because in order to do anything that will truly matter, a man must first give up himself.

It is a paradox – yet a familiar one – that greatness requires sacrifice. He who would save his own life will lose it. He who gives himself to that which is eternal shall himself be lifted into eternity.

“Just like a rainbow in the dark” by soldelsur is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0