43 - T. S. Eliot

Summary

‘Flinging itself at the last / Limits of self-expression’: these lines from ‘Opera’, one of the early poems by T. S. Eliot in the notebook eventually published as Inventions of the March Hare, convey a barbed attitude towards self-expression that was to be the hallmark of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. At the time ‘still a fairly recent compound’, as the notebook’s editor Christopher Ricks remarks, ‘self-expression’ often occurs in scare quotes in Eliot’s prose. It is related to but not the same as ‘introspection’, the title Eliot gave to a short early prose-poem, also in the notebook, in which ‘the mind’ is observed ‘six feet deep in a cistern’ along with ‘a brown snake with a tri-angular head’ that has ‘swallowed his tail [and] was struggling like two fists interlocked’. The prose-poem wants to find a way to depict the actions of the mind, to objectify the subjective, while ‘self-expression’ claims no such objectivity. Fascination with and resistance to introspection intertwine in the prose-poem’s appalled imagery of internal struggle.

Hence one way to read Eliot’s ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’ is as defensive armoury against the demanding imperatives of introspection and its attendant terrors. The defensiveness is in such statements as the oft-quoted ‘the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality’. And one can detect in the early poetry that attitude being worked towards and worked out. The poetry invariably reveals a metapoetic awareness of itself as artistic medium, often involving the trope of stage or screen for the objectification of emotion, with attendant manoeuvres for distancing the self, such as sliding between first, second and third person pronouns, so that the self is both participant in and observer of experience.