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"PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS' (WILLIAM WORDSWORTH) & "TRADITION & THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT' (T.S. ELIOT).
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Compares two views on the role of the poet in history, proper subjects of poetry, poet's attitude, style, tradition.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Compares two views on the role of the poet in history, proper subjects of poetry, poet's attitude, style, tradition.
Paper Introduction:
The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast from a Marxist standpoint the concepts of the poet articulated in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the presentation of central argument in each essay and then to discuss in detail their views of the poet's relationship to poetic materials and the completed poem, how their concepts of the poet are related to their political commitments and their position in history, and how the dramatic difference in aesthetic perspective can be accounted for.
Two strands of thought inform Wordsworth's view of poet's relationship to the materials of poetry. First, there is the matter of departure from previous wisdom regarding the comportment and presentation of poetry as deriving from something appro
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In hisrevolutionary aspect, Marx sought to break with the past, or more preciselywith the accretion of history that had inhered in the structures of socialdominance. determines theirconsciousness" (Marx 392). This can be interpreted as Marx's formulation of Eliot's ideaof literary tradition to which poets are indebted whether they know it ornot. David H. "Consciousness Derived From Material Conditions, from The German Ideology." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. But toward the end of hisessay Wordsworth says that "all knowledge," whether natural, scientific,aesthetic, or philosophical, comes within the poet's purview, and further,that the poet, by reason of his unique sensitivity, is uniquely qualifiedto enter into, or more exactly to allow entry into him, the characters andenvironment of the poetic subject, and point the poet in the direction of acreation that will "excite thought or feeling in the reader" (Wordsworth313). Meanwhile, social mythology, or ideology"masters and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination"(Marx 393). Ed. That characterization seems to suggestsomething of a circular argument: that a good poem has immediate standingin the traditional canon and becomes itself a part of the informingtradition owing to the fact that it is good enough to qualify. Citing classical Greek culture, for example, he says that "nature andeven the form of society are wrought up in popular fancy in anunconsciously artistic fashion" (Marx 393). Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Wordsworth's second strand of thought is the view, which seemsconsistent with the contemporaneous emergence of Romanticism, that "allgood poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (3 4) thatthe poet creates good poetry according as he or she has "a disposition tobe affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present[and] and ability of conjuring up in himself passions" (3 7) appropriate topoetic production. Richter. Ed. David H. 3 2-314. This points in thedirection of equating the poet's sentiment, however degenerate, with theintegrity of poetic emotion. Wordsworth's characterization of the poet's craft is thediscipline of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (312). 495-98.Wordsworth, William. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. First, there is the matter of departure fromprevious wisdom regarding the comportment and presentation of poetry asderiving from something approximating a rarefied poetic realm. 388- 91.---. Richter. "On Greek Art in Its Time, from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Marx's analysis of received wisdom about ideal order sets the stagefor a revolutionary manifesto along the lines of nothing so much asWordsworth's Preface and declaration of special insight to the facts of theuniverse. On the otherhand, the emotive and sentient range possible when the emotion conveyed ina poem is distinguished from what is felt by a poet is theoreticallylimitless. Two strands of thought inform Wordsworth's view of poet's relationshipto the materials of poetry. If that is the case, then the most vulgar ofpopular verse could be considered high art. Eliot'sformulation is that a poem created in consciousness of the tradition out ofwhich it comes may "appear[] to conform, and is perhaps individual, or itappears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find thatit is one and not the other" (Eliot 5 ). Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Works CitedEliot, T.S. When Eliot says that the "difference between art and the eventis always absolute" (5 1), he is not asserting that the poet cannot takethe whole universe as his subject but rather that the universe of feelingand impulse cannot be exploited by the poet who is functioning in thatuniverse and not in the universe of aesthetic craft. 498-5 3.Marx, Karl. This judgment can be interpreted asEliot's Modernist aspect, Modernism being a response to the post-Romanticnineteenth-century culture. The emotion soinforms the tranquil moment of poetic creation that good poetry mustresult. "In fact," he says (5 2), "the badpoet is usually unconscious [i.e., subject to emotion and feeling] where heought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious"[i.e., so hollow and open to the power of the idea that the intellectualdiscipline of poesie enables the poem to as it were write itself]. In this line of thought, he argues that literary tradition, unlikeindividual poets' emotional makeup, informs poetic creation. modified by the introduction of the new . 2d ed. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. The relationship of the poet to poem is, accordingly, one of mindand craft and discipline to artifact or manner of presentation, not tofeeling--or anyway not the poet's own. Ed. It did not represent so much a departure from but a response to foundpoetic or other conditions, which Eliot would style tradition. What is required is altogether a new shapeof society. David H. In effect, Wordsworth argues, poetry, moreexactly "what is usually called poetic diction" (3 5), has become soartificial and overblown that it is divorced from human experience. How the poet gets to a proper proportion of consciousness andunconsciousness in the service of the textual artifact as Eliot sees itamounts to his refutation of Wordsworth's claim for the poet's uniquelysensitive habit of mind. The poet's ability to train himself to a habit of mindand technical competence that opens him to the greatest rush of feeling, tolose himself as it were in "an entire delusion, and even confound andidentify his own feelings" (3 8) with the objects of poetry, is the sourceof good poetry. Indeed, if Eliot is right and Wordsworth wrong onthat point, then in theory Wordsworth's claim of poetic jurisdiction overthe whole of the universe is valid only according as the individual poetpossesses a competently habituated sensibility. Richter. 2d ed. "T.S. Eliot's essay also refutes the integrity of Wordsworth's revolutionaryclaim to have departed radically from the poetic conventions of previousages. That, indeed, appears to be thereason Wordsworth distinguishes between "Babes in the Wood" and doggerel(Wordsworth 313). This traditionis "an ideal order . Inparticular, Wordsworth is at pains not to not personify abstract ideas,which appears to mean that he will not adopt the medieval/classicalconvention of allegory as the principal mode of expression meant to"elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (Wordsworth 3 5). The poem's passion, not the poet's, is (or should be) the coreconcern. Eliot, indeed, appears to take the view that good poets arelikely to have read the work of their predecessors, or more exactly shouldhave done so much reading that the tradition has been fully absorbed by theconsciousness and integrated with the poet's fundamental organism, readilyaccessible for and applicable to the creative process. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. From atwentieth-century perspective it can be seen that Wordsworth and Coleridgewere exponents of early Romanticism, which was itself a response to theintellectual character of the late Enlightenment, and which woulddegenerate into the more sentimental, unfocused post-Romantic culturalexpressions of the later nineteenth century. On the other hand it is difficult to see how the emotivismunderlying Wordsworth's poesie, despite its commitment to as it were (fautede mieux) proletarian evocations instead of classical and religious motifs,could be reconciled with Marx's analysis and suspicion of a culture thathad degenerated from Romanticism into post-Romantic (bourgeois, for Marx)sensibility. 2d ed. David H. But unlike Eliot, Marx seestradition as pernicious because it is so pervasive as to have become anunconscious force. . And Eliot is not having it. The tone of his essaysuggests that where a poet's sentiment is coeval with poetic creation,vulgarity and degeneration of very poetic form are inevitable. Accordingly, one wonders whether it is a law of historicaldeterminism or simple cosmic irony that, as Eliot understood from theconceptual sloppiness embedded into the Wordsworthian aesthetic and as thepostmodern world appears to have recognized in the wake of degeneratepositive programs of revolutionary Marxism, the facts of unfolding socialand literary history may belie the permanence and the integrity of bothpoetic and political verities and revolution. . . "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. . Marx's argument is dense, but his social theory focuses on whathe saw as the power of society over the individual, which he formulates asthe fact that individuals' "social being . 2d ed. It is also another way of sayingthat even the best and most innovative of poets cannot escape the influenceof past poetry. Marx denies a moral claim for ideal order, when theweight of evidence of the culture is on the side of the Marxist analysis ofsocial injustice as the very shape of society. . This whole enterprise is only--or anyway more--possible in connectionwith the rustic subjects of Lyrical Ballads. 392-93.Richter, David H. Richter. If, as Richter says, Eliotis arguing that "the tradition writes itself, as it were, using the poet asa catalyst for converting emotion and thought into poetry" (Richter 497),Marx is saying that this is no achievement, thank you, of poetry, ofliterary milieu, or of society. Indirectly, this line of thought argues that Wordsworth'srevolutionary claims for Lyrical Ballads as the herald of death of the oldpoetic style and the birth of the new in terms of real life may have beenoverblown, however innovative the poetry itself might have been at thetime. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. workof art among them" (Eliot 499). That is, it does not matter at all what the poet isfeeling or whether the poet feels anything at all; what is surrendered tois the artifact, the thing made, the poem, which has an integrity and lifeof its own. Ed. Ed. It was this culture, too, that Marx took as his subject. David H. . The particular claims made by Wordsworth regarding proper poeticsensibility and praxis are specifically and programmatically refuted byEliot. In making aclaim for treatment of the personalities, environment, and subjects ofeveryday life, Wordsworth implicitly criticizes the poetic sensibility ofthe preceding age, which often takes the form of epic and often takes asits subject the classical theogony or a highfalutin moral abstraction. Good poetry, Eliot says, is not created in a great rush of feelingand the unique talent that a poet has for self-expression but rather in adisciplined project of depersonalization, which is defined as "a continualsurrender of himself as he is at the moment to something that is morevaluable" (Eliot 5 ). Thiscomes down to a direct and unequivocal refutation of Romantic sensibility,a point also made by Richter in describing Eliot as an exponent of literaryModernism (496, 498). This last-named cycle ofexpression, Eliot deplores, when he says that poetry does not (= shouldnot) turn emotion loose but escapes from it, does not express (the poet's)personality but escapes from it (5 2). Richter. Eliot." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2d ed. The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast from a Marxiststandpoint the concepts of the poet articulated in Wordsworth's Preface toLyrical Ballads and Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The planof the research will be to set forth in general terms the presentation ofcentral argument in each essay and then to discuss in detail their views ofthe poet's relationship to poetic materials and the completed poem, howtheir concepts of the poet are related to their political commitments andtheir position in history, and how the dramatic difference in aestheticperspective can be accounted for. The decisionto "choose incidents and situations from common life" (3 3) is presented asa decision for closeness to nature and the "elementary feelings" of therustic, which Wordsworth implies have been refined out of the prospectivereadership of Lyrical Ballads.
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