form and content which was the original artistic expression of that
freedom.
The purported classicism of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
performs the same trick, for at the same time as it demands submission
of the poem to a prior standard of judgement, it actually adapts the
tradition which provides that standard to the work:
The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order amongst themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing
order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the
whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English
literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the past.^131
On this reckoning, it is difficult to see what work would not cohere.
Anything new will have been found to have its antecedents in the past,
because the entire past is altered by it, and the past ‘abandons nothingen
route’( 16 ). And this has repercussions for the notion of ‘impersonality’,
for if impersonality means giving up the pretence to unique self-expres-
sion for the sake of being a medium for the voices of the tradition, then
every form, word or rhythm in the poem can have its justification by
reference to that all-embracing tradition, rather than to some interior
quality of the poet. The radical strategy of ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’ to attack the ‘metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the
soul’ ( 19 ) means that any attempt to say where the voice of one poet
ends and another begins is a fiction, just as for the Eliot of the Ph.D.
on Bradley, there is noa prioridistinction between the self and the world
that surrounds it, and the necessary attempts at division we make are
pragmatic rather than metaphysical:
The self, we find, seems to depend on a world which in turn depends on it; and
nowhere, I repeat, can we find anything original or ultimate. And the self
depends as well on other selves; it is not given as direct experience, but is an
interpretation of experience by interaction with other selves. The self is a
construction.^132
But if poetry is a matter of the inseparable dependency of tradition and
the individual talent, then no poetry whatsoever can be rhetorical. For
Inside and outside modernism 55