I really loved how Nietzsche described the co-arision of a prison and a fortress from our so-called “vocabulary of truth.” A few years ago I read a really interesting article about that I tried to find about how metaphors are used to color and solidify abstract concepts – to make them within reach of human beings.

Wait, I think I found it! Here it is. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/opinion/12brooks.html

In this article, David Brooks writes “it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.” Very Nietzschean. We create an artificial reality using language as a marker, but once we deconstruct the vocabulary we use to describe the world, we indeed have no choice but to take note of how delusional our understanding of the world is. Brooks then goes on to say that “if much of our thinking is shaped and driven by metaphor, then the skilled thinker will be able to recognize patterns, blend patterns, apprehend the relationships and pursue unexpected likenesses.” I think T.S. Eliot would appreciate this sentiment a lot, and it’s sort of in keeping with the reasoning behind why we might have been assigned these two essays one after each other.

Anyways, now to contextualize this academically within a Nietzschean framework:

From a preliminary reading of the text, I was really interested in how one would, in a Nietzschean sense, “cast off the mark of servitude” and “”become the master of itself.”

Although my understanding of this particular essay is a little bit tenuous, it would seem to be that even though human beings are beholden to language as a synthetic, aesthetic project, those with a “liberated intellect” are able to use metaphorical frameworks as a “mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it isn now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions.” A tertiary question I have is how one obtains a liberated intellect. More importantly, I think that Nietzsche is suggesting that even though men (and inferably women) use language, one could at least still be subversive within the confines of this prison that language creates; to constantly destroy and create within language, mastering it in a sense and continuously evolving it in service of one’s intuition, not their mind.

Nietzsche states that this “man of intuition, standing in the midst of a culture, reaps directly from his intuitions not just protection from harm but also a constant stream of brightness, a lighting of spirit, redemption, and release.” It seems that, if one wants to be successful within Nietzsche’s eyes, one must strive to be a man of intuition. Nietzsche seems to be condemning neediness above everything. It’s not using language that is a failure on humanity’s part, but needing it, being unable to deconstruct or change it. Truth is beyond the scope of a mortal being. However, the difference between a stoic man and man of intuition is that one is genuinely inured from harm, and one simply wears a mask, circumventing both harm and redemption.

“Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.”

In this article, Eliot engages in a lot of interesting questions informed by pre-existing literary traditions, or rather the significance of new poetry in relation to these pre-existing literary traditions. I apologize in advance, because my thought process tends to be slightly non-linear, but these are the notes I have to offer from my reading of the text:

Part One:

1). Eliot begins this essay by commenting on how western (American) culture tends to devalue critical thought and underscore the importance of individuality within a text. I think his use of the word “isolate” is very interesting, in his quote “We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessor; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.” Eliot seems to be a little snarky in this quote – he’s not critical of the poetic traditions being formed by our cultural moment in time, but rather, how our poetic tradition is currently evaluated. It’s how we read poetry that is the problem. By trying to fragment a poem, and isolate a specific turn of phrase or stylistic technique, we are deconstructing it and committing a sort of epistemic violence against a text. In this regard, I think Eliot is quite right. It becomes a fools errand to try and distill what makes a poem special, since it’s hard to read something without being informed by a specific context. Usually, reading a text in it’s entirety with a historical or authorial background helps to achieve a deeper understanding and appreciation for a work.

Eliot continues: “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, asset their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot is arguing that poetry informed by different literary traditions tends to be good not despite, but because of their service to “the dead poets.”

2). “Novelty is better than repetition.” Eliot is quick however to refute the inevitable critique following these quotes, that without some sort of novelty/individuality/originality, poetry as well as all other art-forms would stagnate.

The following quote seemed really important to me:
“Tradition is a matter of much wider significant. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain tit by great labour.” Traditional in this sense doesn’t mean mimicking other writer’s works, but rather suggests a mastery of other styles of writing. Eliot is brilliant in his ability and dexterity to shift the definition of traditional from repetitious/boring to disciplined/masterful.

Eliot then seems to be encouraging a poet to write so that “the timeless and… the temporal [come] together,” which would allow a writer to enter a historical canon of literature, and yet still represent “his own contemporaneity.” “This historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

3). “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” This quote is fairly self-explanatory. Aesthetically, for something new to enter this historical/literary canon it must be able to be defined and discussed with the same vocabulary that is used for previous types of art. Now this is where it gets interesting. Eliot goes on to say that “The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” I think Eliot is encouraging artists to be forward-looking – like, poets should be striving to have individuality in their work, so that the past becomes contextualized by the present.

4). Conformity and individuality are not mutually exclusive, but rather, depend upon each other? I wasn’t sure of the meaning of this paragraph, but I think that’s the gist of it.

5). So. The purpose of this essay is finally clarified (I think? This might be a trap): “an intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past.” Poets have the option to
a). “Take the past as a lump.” – Inadmissible
b). “Form himself wholly on one or two private admirations.” – An important experience of youth
c). “Form himself wholly on upon one preferred period.” – A pleasant and highly preferred supplement

d). What they should do, however, is realize that “Art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.” So, to attempt a summation of the message Eliot is trying to convey: Poets need to know that all periods of art are equally important, and somehow be writing in the “conscious present.” Note to self: Try and do more research into what the “conscious present” entails and signifies.

“Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did’. Precisely, and they are that which we know.” Art becomes posited as less a deliberate individual exercise, but a natural and organic evolution, in which individual authorial bodies kindof start to have less agency over how their art is perceived. Art that belongs to a “pantheon” can never be created in a vacuum.

6). “What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

So maybe my point that artists should be forward looking was wrong, and in fact they should self-sacrifice for this “present consciousness” in order to perpetuate the western literary tradition. —> The depersonalization of art in so that it may approach the condition of science.

Part Two:

1). Eliot works to disentangle the poet from his poetry. Technical skill that manifests itself within a poem should supersede a poet’s personality (either in real life, or the personality that evidences itself within a work). Our culture uses poets in order to further a prestige economy in which the ability to name-dropping becomes more proficient, or rather or more of a marker of education and class than actual appreciation of a poem.

2). The mind of the poet should be like platinum “inert, neutral, and unchanged.” The individual should separate “the man who suffers and the mind which creates”. Eliot is suggesting that poets should be able to produce/manufacture art irrespective of their emotional condition.

Feelings vs. Emotion – Not exactly sure what the difference between the two is, but I’m willing to make a conjecture and say one of them is more aesthetic. “The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

3). Eliot values the intensity of the artistic process over the intensity of the end result. He argues that the impressions and experiences of the poet should not construct a poet’s poetry.

4). Under his formula, structural emotion (provided by drama) + floating feelings (having an affinity to this emotion by no mean superficially evident) = dominant tone = new art emotion. So conceivably, it’s not personal emotions of the poet that is remarkable or interesting, but rather the emotion in the poem that is complex. I need to revisit this paragraph, after his analysis of a stanza. Eliot makes a very tenable argument, that “one error of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones, and in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actually emotions at all.”

5). Eliot argues that good poetry should be a form of escapism. I actually really enjoyed that point. I think there is something healing about reading poetry as a way to escape from one’s life, although I’m sure there is therapeutic value as well in poetry that allows the reader to confront issues in their past.

“Both errors tend to make him ‘personal’. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion: it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Eliot is a little snarky – the way this sentence reads is like it’s almost pandering to the reader – it’s subtle, but I think it cheapens his overall argument. Implying that the reader, if s/he has emotions and personality, would agree with the contentions of his essay, is sort of facetious and I think almost shuts the text off from the type of critical thought it purports to encourage in the beginning of the essay, instead of beginning a genuine and powerful conversation about the intersectionality of tradition and the individual talent.

Part Three:

1). Eliot reveals that the point of his proposal to disentangle the poet from his poetry is to create a better and more useful way to evaluate poetry (what is good, or what he proposes to be good, and what is bad). Significant emotion is a more exacting, more strenuous, and a more valuable thing to achieve than sincere emotion or technical excellence. This “emotion has it’s life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.”

“The emotion of art is impersonal.”

2). The poet must be cognizant of the present as well as the past, in order to depersonalize his emotions and fully devote himself to his work. The present moment of the past (the conscious present) > the present.