the individual artist, with all that it implies about a difference between
internal and external, one person and another. ‘The progress of an artist is
a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’, runs the
famous phrase, but a continual self-sacrifice is one with the wit to keep
crawling off the altar.^144 And it is important that some notion of
private, conscientious struggle is preserved, if we are to defend Eliot’s
metaphor against the charge that ‘self-sacrifice’, for an exhausted post-war
London, smacked less of religious duty and more of the official propa-
ganda that had sanctified the recent slaughter of six million soldiers.
Eliot’s analogy was to see the poet’s mind as a catalyst, which ‘may partly
or exclusively operate on the experience of the man himself; but, the more
perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man
who suffers and the mind which creates’ ( 18 ). But if the mind which
creates really is nothing but a shred of platinum, seizing and combining
images in a purely chemical process, then there is no reason to attribute
the kind of spiritual victory to the dispassionate use of one’s feelings in the
service of art that ‘self-sacrifice’ actually implies. For all its attack on
Wordsworthian notions of poetic creation, ultimately Eliot’s alternations
between an ‘unconscious’ ( 21 ) necessary process and a conscious deliberate
act – neatly conflated in the chemical and mental semantics of his word
‘concentration’ ( 21 ) – reflect Wordsworth’s own alternation between
spontaneous overflow and recollection in tranquillity, and require some
continuity of the person between them. Perhaps fearing that his account
of the unconscious process of creation has strayed too closely into Ro-
mantic territory, Eliot recoups himself at the end of part II: ‘only those
with personality and emotions know what it is to want to escape from
these things’ ( 21 ). But this sneer costs his argument dear, for it effectively
means that impersonality in poetry is in the final analysis always a sign for
personality in abeyance, and the focus of the argument is firmly back on
the individual artist again. The conspicuous presence of Tradition
in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ would covertly testify to the
emotions whose private limitations it was supposed to overcome; its
autonomy, in other words, would itself turn out to be contingent.
5
Modernism’s arguments to justify its own verse and diminish that of its
Georgian rivals were made in the name of denouncing rhetoric, the
presence of words and forms externally influencing the poem’s heart.
There are various names for the remedy – Imagism, Classicism, the
Inside and outside modernism 59