What Happened to “Modern Tendencies in Poetry”

Summary

Editors typically aim to minimize uncertainty, on multiple levels. But one of the salutary effects of reading The Complete Prose might actually be to introduce degrees of uncertainty. For both editors and readers alike, the experience of reading Eliot's most well-known remarks in their historical and journalistic context, alongside hundreds of other essays and reviews—rather than encountering them selected and anthologized, as if set in stone—has a startling and sobering effect. It introduces doubt: about their finality, their consistency, their apparent inevitability. And that doubt may be just enough to suggest that the portrait of Eliot that we have painted for ourselves is, well, unfinished. We find ourselves learning to think about him again, beyond the well-worn, nearly memorized phrases of “Hamlet,” “The Metaphysical Poets,” and “Dante.”

Take, for instance, the most well-known essay of his canon, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the text that most non-specialists have in mind when they write of Eliot's “doctrine” or “theory.” This highly influential and anthologized essay was, as we know, composed and published in two installments. After the first part appeared in September 1919, Eliot wrote about ten reviews and essays, including “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” a lecture that he delivered at the end of October. Only then did he return to finish “Tradition,” the second installment of which appeared in December. That essay seemed, in fact, much less important to him than the text of the lecture, which nearly became his first book. Grasping the relationship between these two texts was instructive for me, as coeditor of volume 2, and I think it will illuminate the kind of productive uncertainties that The Complete Prose invites.

Almost a decade after the first edition of Donald Gallup's bibliography appeared (1952), D. M. Walmsley discovered an article by Eliot in the British Museum, buried in the first issue of an obscure Indian journal called Shama’a. He dutifully sent to Gallup the strange text, filled with proofreading and typographical errors and printed in a magazine with an awkwardly drawn and hand-lettered cover. Gallup discovered that the text actually derived from a public lecture, the details of which he conveyed in the bibliography's revised edition (1969). Eliot had delivered the lecture for the Arts League of Service, an organization founded earlier that year to support artists during postwar reconstruction. They were regarded by the London orthodox “as revolutionaries and extremists.”