hence becomeunconditionedby any private history or experience, for that
Tradition ironises all contingent points of view.^141 M. A. R. Habib has
drawn attention to the similarity between Hegel and Bradley’s philosoph-
ical Absolute and Eliot’s ideas about literary form: the ‘Tradition’ is, in
the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s book on Jena Romanticism, a
literary absolute.^142
The ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ and their culmination in
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ present themselves as an attack on
Wordsworthian notions of the individual poet. Rather than poetry being
words that depend on the poet’s internal emotions, poetry is the uncon-
scious ‘concentration’ of the Tradition, involving the thoughts and feel-
ings of persons far removed from the individual who makes it. But
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was not Eliot’s last word on Words-
worth or the Georgians. In 1933 , in a memorial essay for Harold Monro
(with whom he had remained friends), Eliot tried to wrest Monro’s poetry
from the Georgian context that Monro had helped create:
With Georgian poetry he had little in common... I supposed long ago, that
Harold Monro’s poetry belonged in this category – with the poetry of writers not
unfairly representable in anthologies; and in those days I was interested only in
the sort of thing I wanted to do myself, and took no interest in what diverged
from my own direction. But his poetry differs from Georgian verse proper in
important respects. The majority of those writers occupied themselves with
subject matter which is – and not in the best sense – impersonal; which belongs
to the sensibility of the ordinary sensitive person, not primarily only to the
sensitive poet.^143
The admission that there might be a worse sense of impersonality – the
work that might have been written by anybody sensitive enough – implies
that the best sense of impersonality, Eliot’s own, actually depends on not
taking his philosophical scepticism about personality as an experienced
truth, since its whole force actually depends on a fairly vigorous conception
of the individual poet. For in a sense, the case of the Georgians reveals why
Eliot’s argument for impersonality is too strong. If the whole of literature
really does form a simultaneous order, why should Wordsworth’s presence
embarrass the Georgians, if poetry is not the expression of personality but
the voice of the Tradition in the poet? Unless Wordsworth is not part of
the Tradition at all (and sometimes Eliot writes as if the Tradition
skipped straight from Marvell to modernism), the problem can only be
that the Georgians are not conscious enough of Wordsworth’s influence
to sacrifice themselves to it, and what this underlines is the way that being
impersonal actually depends upon the persistent conscious submission of
58 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism