of intelligence, of which an important function is the discernment of exactly
what, and how much, we feel in any given situation.^119
In other words, Georgian and Imagist poetry is bad when it is insuffi-
ciently aware of its own emotions, and thus always hasborrowedelements
in it; Georgian formulae, convention, vagueness and insularity are both
causes and symptoms of this basic lack of self-awareness. Eliot’s remedy,
though, was not suggested until the fourth and final ‘Reflection’ of 1919 ,
that in order to change ‘from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a
person’, it is necessary to have a feeling of ‘profound kinship, or rather of
a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author’. In
discovering this intimacy with another, the writer discovers himself, but
the poem that results is not a purer distillation of the writer’s private self.
Rather, it will contain the other author and continue him for the present
time: ‘we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become
bearers of a tradition’.^120 These reflections were reworked a few months
later into ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, where the individual
author must now surrender himself ‘as he is at the moment to something
which is more valuable’, the tradition of the ‘mind of Europe’.^121 It is this
famous essay, with its suspicion of the ‘metaphysical theory of the
substantial unity of the soul’ ( 19 ), that sets the stage for the fragmented
polyvocality ofThe Waste Land. And yet at first it seems that Eliot has
swung round 180 degrees over the transition from the first of these
‘Reflections’ to ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. In 1917 , the poet
is urged to discern what he or she really feels. In 1919 , the poet is a
‘medium’ for the tradition, and hence ‘emotions which he has never
experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him’ ( 21 ). What
connects them both, however, is the same underlying commitment to
Coleridge’s ideal for the work of art, the elimination of exteriority.
The ‘Reflections’ series began as part of Eliot’s attempt to separate his
and Pound’s work from the burgeoning Imagist movement, which in
Pound’s words had become ‘the dilutation ofvers libre, Amygism, Lee
Masterism, general floppiness’.^122 Free verse was becoming nothing but an
expression of the undisciplined whim of the individual poet, rather than the
ruthless pruning of the Imagist poem, as the preface to Amy Lowell’s rival
Imagist anthology made clear in a borrowing from Pound’s favourite critic,
Re ́my de Gourmont: ‘Individualism in literature, liberty of art, abandon-
ment of existing forms... the sole excuse which a man can have for writing
is to write down himself...Heshould create his own aesthetics and we
should admit there are as many aesthetics as there are original minds.’^123
Inside and outside modernism 53