there can be nothing foreign to the poet’s self-expression, because
by making the meaning of the poem dependent on the ahistorical Trad-
ition, there is no original internal reality to traduce by convention.
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is both a parody and a culmination
of the Romantic drive for sincerity, for inner, private expression and other
people’s words have become indissolubly one.
The strangeness of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in fact, is that
it rejects Romantic poetry to present in its place a classicism which
recapitulates some of the chief characteristics of Romantic poetry sug-
gested by the original definer of those terms, Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel’s
definitions were conceived as part-development and part-criticism of
Schiller’s opposition between naı ̈ve and sentimental; both began with
the principle that poetry was the incarnation of freedom, but where
Schiller wanted a reunification, Schlegel thought that such freedom could
more truly be realised by a Romantic takeover. ‘All the classical poetical
genres have now become ridiculous in their strict purity’, he declared,
whereas Romantic poetry
alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognises as its first commandment
that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself. The romantic kind of
poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for
in a certain sense all poetry is, or should be, romantic.^133
Romantic freedom exceeds not only generic classification, however, but
the limits of every individual poem. Building on Schiller’s idea of the
sentimental poet as one whose inner reflections allow him a new kind of
freedom, Schlegel claimed that poetry itself manifests this infinite, reflect-
ive freedom in the relationbetween poems, and hence to retain the
contingent form and expression of any particular one would place a limit
on this freedom. Instead, poetry models infinite freedom by the tran-
scendence of any determined perspective, an endless moving-beyond
which Schlegel baptisedirony: ‘Internally, the mood that surveys every-
thing and rises infinitely above all limitations, even above its own art,
virtue or genius; externally, in its execution: the mimic style of an
averagely gifted Italianbuffo.^134 The role of thebuffowas as an ironic
framing device, mixing comic and tragic genres by stepping in between
the acts of a play and commenting on or parodying what had just
happened – just as Eliot’s most famous poem never settles into one voice
or perspective, but mixes tragedy with sonnets, or nursery rhymes with
ornithological handbooks. If this constant irony ensures that the poet or
poem is constantly moving beyond any fixed position in a perpetual
56 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism