A - White - Tradição e Talento Individual Eliot

'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Revisited
Author(s): Peter White

Source: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 58, No. 235 (Jun., 2007), pp. 364-
392
Published by: Oxford University Press
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'TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT' REVISITED
BY PETER WHITE
Commentators have long been aware of the striking parallels between T S. Eliot's
essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' his seminal theoretical statement, and
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' one of the more substantial of his uncollected
pieces of the same period. Until now, however, the relationship between these two
documents has not been properly understood. In fact 'Modern Tendencies in
Poetry' constitutes a revision of the first part of its more widely disseminated
companion piece, one that modifies and re-purposes its author's most famous
theoretical provocations in a number of important ways. Intriguing in and of
itself, this act of revision acquires added significance in the context of passages in
Eliot's correspondence from late 1919 relating to The Art ofPoetry, a treatise on the
degeneracy of contemporary verse that he planned to write for publication by the
Egoist Press in the spring of 1920.
This study examines the relationship between two prose works byT. S. Eliot written
at the very beginning of the period between the two world wars. One of them is the
famous essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' which was originally published
in two instalments in the Egoist in late 1919 and subsequently reprinted in Eliot's
first full-length prose volume The Sacred Wood (1920). The other is an uncollected
piece with the rather un-Eliotic title 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' which found
its way into print in Madras as part of the April 1920 maiden issue of a periodical
called Shamaah. Each of these pieces forms a full and self-contained exposition of
Eliot's doctrine of impersonality, and in a number of very obvious ways they overlap
with and duplicate each other. Critics and commentators have been less than
responsive, however, to the existence of telling discrepancies between them in
their presentation of that body of doctrine. It is in the consideration of these
discrepancies and discontinuities that the interest of the comparison lies.'
Although references to'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' are relatively common in
Eliot scholarship published during the last 12 years or so, the fullest and most
searching study of the piece to date is still Michael Whitworth's illuminating
article 'Pices d'identitd: T. S. Eliot, J.W.N. Sullivan and Poetic Impersonality',
published in the journal English Literature in Transition in 1996. The value of
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' for Whitworth's purposes is that it reveals more
1 See 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', Egoist, 6/4 (September 1919), 54-5 (Gallup
C90); 'Tradition and the Individual Talent: II', Egoist, 6/5 (Dec. 1919), 72-3 (Gallup C97);
'Tradition and the Individual Talent', The Sacred Wood (London, 1920), 42-53, and 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry', Shama', 1/1 (April 1920), [9]-18 (Gallup C108a). Copies of the first
issue of Shama'a are held in the British Library, the Widener Library at Harvard, and the
Library of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 58, No. 235
? The Author 2007 Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/res/hgm018 Advance Access published on 29 April 2007
TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT 365
clearly than 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Eliot's participation in a debate
among contributors to John Middleton Murry's Athenaeum about the relations and
affinities between art and science, a debate led by J. W N. Sullivan, the paper's
assistant editor. Central to 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' is the proposition that
the labours of a great poet resemble those of a great scientist. It is an analogy that
is explored at some length and which comes to inform almost every aspect of Eliot's
credo of impersonality as it is there expressed. In 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' by contrast this poetry-science analogy is explicit only in the passing sugges-
tion, at the end of the essay's first instalment, that through depersonalization 'art may
be said to approach the condition of science' (a decidedly Eliotic reworking of Pater's
dictum'[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music').2 The foreground-
ing of the art-as-science analogy in 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' prompts
Whitworth to draw other parallels between Sullivan's work and Eliot's, to adduce the
former's journalism as an important context not only for the Shamaa piece but also
for 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' In tracing these connections, Whitworth
succeeds in creating a picture of dialogue and interaction between Eliot, Sullivan,
and other Athenaeum contributors that is ultimately a very convincing one. His dis-
cussion of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' and 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'
also does much to substantiate his opening claim that, placed in its original post-war
context, the contribution to Shama'a 'could be considered the more important piece'3
Whitworth's main purpose, then, is to restore a sense of the immediate jour-
nalistic context of some of Eliot's more well-known theoretical provocations, to
demonstrate his involvement with 'the intellectual ferment of his time' 4 If, taken
as a study of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' per se, his study has a shortcoming, it
is that it appears to have as one of its underlying assumptions the idea that, for all
their superficial differences, Eliot's various statements of his doctrine of imper-
sonality in this period are essentially consistent and continuous with each other.
Whitworth, it is true, takes as his point of departure one very significant differ-
ence between 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and 'Modern Tendencies in
Poetry', namely the greater prominence of the art-as-science analogy in the
2 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', The Sacred Wood, 47; W. Pater, 'The School of
Giorgione' The Renaissance.: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; London, 1928), [135]-161: 140.
3 'Pieces d'identitd: T. S. Eliot, J. W N. Sullivan and Poetic Impersonality', English Literature in
Transition, 39/2 (1996), 149-170: 150. See also J. Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History:
Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton NJ, 1987), 209; R. Bush, 'T. S. Eliot and
Modernism at the Present Time' in R. Bush, (ed.), T S. Eliot: The Modernist in History
(Cambridge, 1991), 191-204: 200: 204; G. McDonald, Learning to be Modern (Oxford, 1993),
113, 138; R. Schuchard, Eliots Dark Angel: Intersections of Life andArt (New York, 1999), 50, 74,
110, 200, 229; L. Menand, 'T. S. Eliot', The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism,
ed. H. B. Nisbet, C. Rawson (Cambridge, 1989-), VII: Modernism and the New Criticism,
ed. A. Walton Litz, L. Menand and L. Rainey (2000), 17-56, 30, and Richard Badenhausen
etc. (Cambridge, 2000), 17-56: 30, and R. Badenhausen, T S. Eliot and the Art ofCollaboration
(Cambridge, 2005), 44-5, 51, 104, 215.
4 'Pieces d'identite', 150.
366 PETER WHITE
Shamah' piece. But he does not set out to elicit other discrepancies between the
two documents or to show that they reflect different stages in the development of
their author's thinking about poetic impersonality and tradition during the
period in question. Indeed, Whitworth's argument does not prompt him to raise
the question of the order in which Eliot's various pronouncements in this
connection were committed to paper. And though it is clear from Whitworth's
introductory remarks that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' is to be regarded as
something more than a mere 'gloss' upon 'Tradition and the Individual Talent',
in his account of Eliot's relationship with Sullivan the two pieces seem effectively
to merge into one composite statement of Eliot's poetic doctrine: it is not in the
end apparent, that is, what the substantive elements of 'Modern Tendencies in
Poetry' actually are, or whether they are of wider significance beyond the discus-
sion of the Eliot-Sullivan association. This may be in part because Whitworth
attaches relatively little significance to passages in Eliot's correspondence of the
period revealing that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' briefly occupied a far more
central place in his plans for his first prose volume than its subsequent publica-
tion history suggests. This information is relegated by Whitworth to one of his
footnotes.5
The contention here, in the following paragraphs, is that 'Modern Tendencies
in Poetry' constitutes a revision of the opening instalment of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent', one that modifies and re-purposes the theoretical formulations
advanced in the latter7ssay in a number of significant ways. Comparison of the
two pieces reveals not only that the author of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'
expanded upon and developed his source, but also, more importantly, that in a
key respect he actually retreated from it, actively suppressing one element from
the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that has subsequently come
to be seen as a cornerstone of his critical programme at this time. Intriguing in
and of itself, this act of revision begins to seem all the more significant when
evaluated in the context of Eliot's changing plans for his first prose volume as
these are revealed in his correspondence of the period. Eliot's contribution to
Shamah' offers an iteration of his doctrine of impersonality that is in significant
ways inconsistent with the one given by his early collected writings, and one that
was itself originally meant for publication in volume form. Implicitly, that is,
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' forms a critique of the opening section of
'Tradition and the Individual Talent' providing evidence of an ambivalence on
Eliot's part regarding elements of his most famous essay that have long been
regarded as fundamental and inalienable parts of his thought. By reconsidering
the role of the Shama'i piece in its author's earliest attempts to project himself as a
critic it is also possible to shed new light on the complexities of the process
through which 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', first published inconspicu-
ously in the pages of the ailing Egoist, came to be reprinted as the centre-piece of
The Sacred Wood.
5 Ibid. 167, note 4.
Eliot's contribution to Shamah was first brought to the attention of scholars in

1960 by D. M. Walmsley, who announced his discovery in a brief submission to the
'Bibliographical Notes and Queries' section of the journal Book Collector. That it
was until then a forgotten work, rather than merely a neglected one, is evidenced
by the fact that it had not come to the attention of Donald Gallup, its author's
assiduous bibliographer, during his compilation of the 1952 first editon of his
Bibliography. When finally 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' did resurface, it seems
to have done so quite by chance. Walmsley, who unearthed this rarity from among
the holdings of the British Museum, was apparently unaware either of the full
significance of his find or of the circumstances of its composition:
The article treats mainly of the influence of French poets, particularly Laforgue, Rimbaud
and Mallarme, on contemporary English poets, and Eliot coins the term 'dadaism' to
denote the kind of poetry produced by Tristan Tzara and published in the 'collection
dada', Zurich.
It was Gallup who subsequently established that the 'article' in question was in
fact not an article at all but the text of a lecture, a product of its author's brief
association with a London-based organisation called the Arts League of Service.
Possibly he did so by consulting contemporary sources: though the editors of
Shamah provided their readers with no information as to the provenance of
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' other than an authorial byline, a brief article on
the Arts League of Service and its aims in the 'Notes and Comments' section of
the first issue provides one clue as to its origin. In conjunction with other
evidence this may have allowed Gallup to resolve the puzzling question of how it
was that Eliot's work came to be published in India, in a periodical with which he
had no apparent connection. It is also possible that Gallup consulted Eliot
himself, who was in his early seventies when Walmsley made his discovery, for
information as to the genesis of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' Either way,
Gallup would certainly have discovered that the lecture from which the piece
derived was delivered in Westminster on 28 October 1919. He may also have
learned that it was published in Shamah (the title is 'a Persian word for Light and
the lamp that bears the light') through the agency of one of the three secretaries
of the Arts League of Service.6
6 See D. M. Walmsley,'Unrecorded Article byT. S. Eliot' Note 139 in 'Bibliographical Notes

and Queries', Book Collector 9/2 (Summer 1960), 198-9: 199, and both the 1952 and 1969
editions of Gallup's T S. Eliot: A Bibliography, Including Contributions to Periodicals and
Foreign Translations (London, 1952, rev. edn. 1969). David Munro Walmsley, PH.D., was a
graduate of King's College, London, and Headmaster of Eckington Grammar School,
Derbyshire, from 1937 to 1954 [see 'Notes on Contributors', History Today, 17/4 (April 1967),
280-281: 281]. He was apparently not an Eliot specialist. In a career that spanned four
decades and saw the publication of important works on figures as diverse as
Thomas Shadwell and Anton Mesmer, he seems to have published only one article on the
author 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'. Walmsley did not advertise the existence of a
contribution to the first issue of Shama'a by Arthur Waley entitled 'Chinese Buddhist
Poetry', which is not listed in E A. Johns, A Bibliography of Arthur Waley, 2nd edn.
368 PETER WHITE
Walmsley's find was first listed among its author's other contributions to peri-
odicals in Section C of Gallup's Bibliography in 1969, 17 years after the publication
of the first edition of that work.' The untypically discursive note that accompanies
its entry there includes an illuminating comment about the lecture quoted from
the 1920 issue of the Bulletin of the Arts League ofService, one which turns out to be
crucial in attempting to understand the relationship between'Modern Tendencies
in Poetry' and 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Scholars are more than
usually indebted to Gallup here for reproducing this line of text, as the British
Library's copy of the 1920 issue of the Bulletin, a source for which no other loca-
tion is recorded, did not survive the Second World War. It is necessary, however,
to question the construction that Gallup places upon his own quotation of this
source. This tends to imply, albeit indirectly, that Eliot's lecture was a source for
'Tradition and the Individual Talent' or an early version of that essay:
C108a Modern Tendencies in Poetry. Shama', Urur, Adjar [sic], India, I. I (Apr. 1920) [9]-18.
One of a series of talks given, beginning in October 1919, under the auspices of the Arts
League of Service, London, at the Conference Hall, Westminster. A five-line excerpt is
printed under the heading "T. S. Eliot on Poetry" in the Bulletin of the Arts League of
Service ([Summer? 1920]), p.9, with a note that the lecture "will also form the theme
of an essay on Poetry which will be published shortly by 'The Egoist'" Actually the
essay ("Tradition and the Individual Talent") had already been printed in the Egoist
(Sept./Oct. - Nov./Dec. 1919) - C90 & 97.8
To assume as Gallup does here that 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is the
'essay' referred to in the Bulletin of the Arts League of Service is on the face of things
entirely defensible. Given the striking parallels that exist between 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' and 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' it seems alto-
gether reasonable to infer that the note on the former in the Bulletin is an adver-
tisement for its more well known Egoist companion piece. So secure indeed does
Gallup's identification of the unnamed piece seem that it comes as something of
a surprise to find that it actually sits rather uneasily with the dating of the two
pieces. The problem with this reading, which has apparently never been chal-
lenged, is that the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' was almost
(London, 1988). See also 'The Arts League of Service' Shamaa', (April 1920), [75]-82: 76-7.
For the translation of the title, see the editorial statement at the beginning of the first issue
of Shamaa' ([3]-5: 4). The dates of the 'Modern Tendencies in Art' lecture series are given in
advertisements appearing in the Athenaeum for 17 October 1919, 1022, 1031, and the
New Statesman for 25 October 1919, 110; the date of Eliot's lecture was given incorrectly as
30 October in an article in the Times entitled 'Drama for Villagers: New Tour by Arts
League of Service' (11 October 1919, 10).
7 Note that Gallup's earliest inventory of Eliot's writings had actually appeared in 1937 -
see D. Gallup, A Catalogue of English and American First Editions of Writings by T S. Eliot
Exhibited in the Yale University Library 22 February to 20 March, 1937 (New Haven, 1937).
8 Gallup, T S. Eliot: A Bibliography, p. 206. Note that Adjar here is a misreading of the
colophon of Shamah, which reads as follows: 'Printed by J. R. Aria at the Vasanta Press,
Urur, Adyar, and Published by Miss M. Chattopadhyay, Aghore Mandir, Santhome,
Madras' Gallup seems to have reproduced this error from Walmsley's note in the
Book Collector, which also has Adjar for Adyar.
certainly already in print, in the September 1919 issue of the Egoist, when Eliot
delivered his lecture on 28 October 1919, whereas the statement quoted from the
Bulletin is cast in the future tense (the lecture 'will also form the theme of an essay
on Poetry'). If 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is the 'essay' referred to here
then the statement in the Bulletin would have been out of date not only when the
latter document was issued by the League in 1920 (shortly before 15 July, when it
was listed along with other 'New Books and Reprints' in the TLS9), but also when
Eliot delivered the lecture to which it relates. This makes it seem all the more odd
that the statement in question is worded so as to convey precisely the sense of
imminent publication (the essay 'will be published shortly').
Examination of Eliot's correspondence for the period suggests an alternative
interpretation of the note in the Bulletin. From a sequence of his letters to various
correspondents written between 5 November 1919 and 26 January 1920 it is clear
that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' was central to Eliot's conception of a volume-
length work, a 'small but constructed book' that he planned to write for
publication in the spring of 1920 by the Egoist Press. This unwritten volume was
formally announced as The Art ofPoetry in a list of Egoist Press publications issued
around the beginning of 1920.10 It was also promised under the same title to
readers of Harriet Shaw Weaver's 'Notice to Readers' in the December 1919
number of the Egoist, the final issue of that periodical." According to Eliot's
correspondence, The Art of Poetry was to have been 'one hundred and fifty pages
or so' in length ('more if large type') and concerned for the most part with
contemporary poetry and its public. More than once Eliot stressed to his
correspondents that his book would not consist of reprinted articles and reviews
('a form of book making to which I am averse'): instead he would 'boil down' the
lecture and 'work in' material from his Egoist articles, perhaps the 'Reflections on
Contemporary Poetry' series, to produce something more organic in form than a
collection of journalistic pieces. In the earliest of these letters he refers to his Arts
League of Service lecture as the projected volume's 'nucleus'12
9 15 July 1920, 458, under the heading 'Art'.

10 The list in question was printed on both sides of a single sheet and presumably meant
for insertion among the pages of Egoist Press publications as a promotional device.
The Art of Poetry is listed with Joyce's Ulysses under the heading 'In Preparation', the latter
priced at 10/6, the former appearing without a price. Scholars are indebted to the
University of Tulsa for making a facsimile of this rare and important document available
electronically [see 'The Egoist Press: Publications' (http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/
JJoyce/dear.dirty dublin. htm), part of 'In Good Company: James Joyce and Publishers,
Readers, Friends. An Exhibition of McFarlin Library's Special Collections in occasion of
the North American James Joyce Symposium, The University of Tulsa, 2003' Luca Crispi,
Stacey Herbert, and Lori N. Curtis, 2003 (http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/JJoyce/
In-Good Company.htm), accessed Tuesday 19 April 2005]. The existence of this list is also
recorded by Gallup (see the 1969 edition of the Bibliography, 362).
11 'We are also able now to promise for the early spring The Art ofPoetry, by MrT S. Eliot'
['Notice to Readers', Egoist 6/5 ([Nov.i] Dec. 1919), 70-1, 71)].
12 See The Letters of T S. Eliot, ed. V Eliot (London, 1988-), I:1898-1922 (1988), 343-4, 346,
351, 355-7, 359. The title of the unwritten Egoist Press volume forms an obvious allusion
to what Eliot would subsequently describe as the 'short and broken treatise' of Aristotle
370 PETER WHITE
A more satisfactory explanation of the note in the Bulletin then is that the word
essay there refers not to 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' but to The Art of
Poetry, which was to have been published not 'in' the Egoist but 'by' (q.v.)
"The Egoist" (i.e. The Egoist Press) in the spring of 1920. In Gallup's transcription
of the passage from the latter source the word Egoist appears unitalicised and
linked to the definite article that precedes it by quotation marks ('The Egoist'),
suggesting that it is specifically the publishing imprint 'The Egoist' that is meant
rather than the periodical the Egoist. The term essay also assimilates itself to this
reading, since essay might well refer to a compact and cohesive publication in
volume form.13
In fact Eliot seems to have abandoned work on The Art ofPoetry several months
prior to the appearance of the note in the Bulletin announcing its forthcoming
publication. References to 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' and the Egoist Press
volume fade from his correspondence at the end of January 1920, and though
one letter from that month suggests that the process of putting the lecture 'into
bookform'14 was underway at that time, there is nothing else to indicate that work
on the volume ever progressed much beyond the conceptual stage. By 10 April
1920, Eliot had contracted with another London publisher, Sir Algernon
Methuen, to produce 'a prose book of essays' for the end of June that year.is The
planned publication date of The Art of Poetry had come and gone by this time-
Eliot had suggested that it would be completed by April-and given that his
enthusiasm for the project seems to have waned long before, it seems unlikely
that he contemplated fulfilling his obligation to Harriet Shaw Weaver after
this date. As his plans changed, however, he seems to have made no attempt to
disabuse his immediate associates of the notion that publication of The Art of
Poetry was imminent. Richard Aldington, for instance, was still waiting for the
Egoist Press volume to materialise in the middle of June 1920, long after
its would-be author had ceased to share with his correspondents his plans
for that work.'6
The question of how the statement quoted by Gallup from the Bulletin should
be interpreted may seem on first inspection to be a rather trivial one, but in fact
('The Perfect Critic: II', Athenaeum, 23 July 1920, 102-4, 103) and, less obviously, to
Campion's Obseruations in the Art ofEnglish Poesy. In giving the volume this title he appears
to have been claiming kinship with two prime exemplars of what he would claim at this
time was the only 'genuine' form of poetic criticism, criticism of poetry written in order to
create poetry (see 'A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry' Chapbook, 2/9 (March 1920),
1-10, 3-4).
13 It is perhaps worth noting that Eliot referred to J. M. Robertson's The Problem of 'Hamlet'
as an 'admirable essay' in the final line of his review of that volume, which dates precisely
from this period (see 'Hamlet and His Problems' Athenaeum, 26 September 1919, 940-1:
941).
14 Letters, 354. 15 Ibid. 379, 382.
16 'I will try to send you a volume of his prose which is being issued by the Egoist; I know
that you with your French training will delight in his easy style and unique point of view'
[Letter to Amy Lowell, 17 June 1920, in R. Aldington, RichardAldington: An Autobiography in
Letters, N. T. Gates (ed.), (University Park, Pa, 1992), 56-9: 57).
each of the two readings discussed here implies a completely different under-
standing of the relationship between 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' Gallup's assumption that the 'essay' referred to
in the Bulletin is 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' appears to carry with it the
implication that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' is essentially a derivative work or
a draft, a recapitulation or rehearsal of doctrines that find their authoritative
expression in the Egoist piece. Assume, on the other hand, that the reference in
the Bulletin is to The Art of Poetry, that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' was the
piece more central to Eliot's conception of what would have been his first full-
length prose volume, and it follows that the lecture should be regarded as a
substantive iteration of its author's theory of poetic impersonality, in no way
subordinate to the Egoist piece.
The Bulletin aside, there is at least some evidence to suggest that composition
of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' was completed after the first part of 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent' had gone to press. Eliot claims in one of his letters to
John Quinn in New York that the preparation of his lecture has prevented him
from responding to a letter from Quinn dated 3 October.17 Given that a piece of
transatlantic mail sent on this date could not have arrived in England much
before 17 October, the implication is that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' was still
unfinished less than a fortnight before its delivery (on 28 October).18 Though the
published correspondence sheds much less light on the circumstances surround-
ing the publication of the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' there
is little reason to suppose that this latter piece was printed after the end of
September, its nominal month of issue. The Egoist may have appeared erratically
during the final year of its run-there were no issues in May, June, August,
October or November of 1919-but the given date of each issue seems typically
to give a relatively reliable indication of the actual date of its production and
distribution. The July 1919 issue, for instance, was certainly in circulation by
18 July; the December 1919 issue, the last, was apparently printed towards the
end of that month and circulated in early January 1920.19
As for the date of composition of the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent', this is likely to remain a matter for speculation. Quite possibly it was
submitted for publication before Saturday 9 August 1919, when Eliot left for a
three-week walking holiday in the Dordogne with Ezra Pound ('I shall not be
doing any writing during that time', he wrote to Harold Monro, 'even my usual
17 Letters, 343-4: 343; 5 November 1919.

18 On 25 March 1920 Eliot received a letter from Quinn dated 6 March; a letter from Eliot
to Charles W. Eliot dated 9 July reached its recipient in Maine on 23 July (see Letters, 377-8
and 322-3).
19 For the dating of the July 1919 issue of the Egoist, see Richard Aldington's letter to Eliot
of 18 July, reproduced alongside Eliot's correspondence of the period (ibid. 321). Eliot
finished his contribution to the December 1919 issue of the Egoist shortly before
18 December and sent a copy to his mother on 11 January 1920 (ibid. 350-1, 354-5).
372 PETER WHITE
work for the Athenaeum').20 It is also conceivable that this part of the essay was one
of a number of prose pieces completed in the month following Eliot's return from
France on Sunday 31 August. Although when he writes to his brother Henry on
14 September he mentions only that he has written two long contributions to the
Athenaeum since his holiday ('one on Swinburne and the Elizabethan drama, and
one on Hamlet'), a letter to Quinn written towards the end of the same month
mentions that he has been engaged writing 'several articles'.21 The piece on tradi-
tion may have been one of these.
It is worth noting here that although Eliot finished composing the second and
concluding instalment of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' several weeks after
the completion of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', he persisted in thinking of his
lecture as the 'nucleus' of his projected Egoist Press volume even as he did so.
The second part of the essay seems not to have been completed until some
point shortly before 18 December 1919, this being the postmarked date of a
letter from Eliot to his mother in which he reports that he has 'just finished'
his contribution to the last issue of the Egoist (i.e. 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent: II'). A couple of sentences later he reaffirms his intentions with regard
to 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' and The Art of Poetry: 'But my New Year's
Resolution is "[...] to prepare a small prose book from my lecture on poetry"'22
On 11 January 1920 he wrote to his mother again, telling her that he had started
to put his lecture 'into bookform' and drawing her attention to Harriet Shaw
Weaver's announcement in the last Egoist promising readers The Art of Poetry
for the spring of 1920.23 In this letter of 11 January he says nothing of his
own contribution to the last Egoist, the second part of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent'.24
II
The opening movement of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' appears, on first

inspection, to be a relatively straightforward and systematic recapitulation of the
main points advanced in the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'.25
20 Ibid. 325-7, xxv. 21 Ibid. 330-1, 335. 22 Ibid. 351. 23 Ibid. 354.
24 A summary of key dates is presented in Appendix B.
25 Cf.'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', [9]-12 (from the start of the third paragraph to the
end of the eleventh) and 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Egoist 6/4 (September 1919),
54-55 (from 'One of the facts that might come to light...' to the end of the first instal-
ment). In both pieces Eliot speaks of great poetry as being impersonal in terms of its
relation both with the past and with the poet, while his assertion in the lecture that 'all
great poets.., seem like parts of one Mind...' strongly recalls the passage from the Egoist
piece relating to the 'mind of Europe'. In 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' it is said that a
great scientist accomplishes his life's work through 'a complete surrender of himself to the
work in which he was absorbed', a statement which is redolent of a passage towards the end
of the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' about the poet's 'continual surren-
der of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable'. More muted
still is the recollection of the word supervention (used in the Egoist piece in discussing the
'supervention of novelty' upon the existing 'ideal order' of monuments) in an unrelated
This impression is reinforced considerably by the fact that in writing his lecture
Eliot chose to duplicate what is probably the single most memorable element of the
Egoist piece-the analogy drawn between the poet's mind and the 'filiated' platinum
shred that makes possible the formation of new chemical compounds. 26 So striking
indeed are the parallels between the two pieces, so derivative does this part of the
lecture seem, that it is easy to overlook the fact there is one key element from the
first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that is conspicuous in 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' only by its absence. This, oddly enough, is the term tradition
itself. It is hard to see how this word could have been more dwelt upon or deliber-
ated over than it is in the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', a piece
which, after all, has as its curtain-raiser a small disquisition on the contemporary
usage and connotations of the term. And yet in 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry',
which in most other respects seems to echo the conclusions of its more famous
counterpart essay, the word tradition is used not once. Indeed, at various points in
his lecture Eliot seems positively to cast about for alternatives, preferring at one
moment the somewhat less economical phrase 'our "heritage" of literature', at
another, the similarly wordy expression 'the whole history of Poetry' In another
paragraph he teeters on the verge of tautology with the assertion that '[g]reat
poetry... is something which is a part of Poetry' in which, again, the poetry with a
capital p seems to some extent to be standing in for tradition, and doing some of its
work.27
These vaguely inelegant and uncomfortable substitutions tend to confirm that

Eliot actively avoided this term in re-casting his theoretical pronouncements for
the lecture platform. It would be a mistake, however, to see the non-appearance of
the word tradition in'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' as evidence merely of a shift in
terminology. The temporary elimination of this word from Eliot's critical vocabu-
lary is arguably only the most tangible sign of an intriguing reticence in this piece
about the very idea of tradition as this is elaborated in the first part of 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent' The notion stated in that essay of a literature as a
'simultaneous order' of works of art, an order of 'existing monuments' that con-
stantly reposition themselves whilst new works are assimilated to the whole28_
this notion is simply not as fully and as vividly evoked in the alternative iteration
of Eliot's theory of impersonality found in the text of his lecture. Though Michael
Whitworth is probably to some extent justified in asserting that both 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' and 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' are concerned with
the notion of 'the simultaneous presence of past literatures',29 in the less
context, the discussion of a poem in which the poet has endeavoured to give 'the emotion
supervening on a certain combination [of objects]'
26 The wordfiliated, used in the cliff-hanging final sentence of the first part of 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent', seems here to mean 'having branches or offshoots'. The duplica-
tion of the catalyst analogy is noted by Whitworth ('Pi&es d'identite', 150).
27 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', 11-12. 28 See The Sacred Wood, 44.
29 'Pi&es d'identit, 150.
374 PETER WHITE
well-known piece this seems to be a latent assumption rather than an explicit

theme. Certainly the words simultaneous and simultaneity, each of which plays
a pivotal role in Eliot's elaboration of his concept of tradition, are entirely
absent from the lecture. It is true that in the most resonant passage of
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' it is suggested that '[t]he life of our "heritage"
of literature is dependent upon the continuance of literature', a suggestion that
can be seen as positing an organic relation between poetry past and present
rather like the one described in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. The same
idea seems also to be present at some level in the assertion, found towards
the beginning of the lecture, that all great poets 'seem like parts of one Mind,
working under different conditions and at different times'. But these are merely
vestiges of the original thesis; in 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' there is nothing
like the insistence upon the interrelatedness of the living and the dead found
in the Egoist piece, nor anything to match the sense that essay conveys of
the literary past as a monumental totality of all the great poetry ever written.
As the word is suppressed, so the 'ideal order' itself ceases to be an object of
direct attention.30
There is some evidence to suggest that this eschewal of tradition in 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' was not quite the aberration it first appears. Indeed, taken
in the context of the other published writings of late 1919 and 1920 this omission
seems to highlight a perceptible variation in the frequency and character of Eliot's
uses of the term. In the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and in
some of the uncollected contributions to periodicals that immediately precede it
in order of publication the word tradition is of course worked intensively, with the
idea that literatures are to be thought of as 'organic formations' or 'organic wholes'
being very obviously in the ascendant. Both word and concept are also much in
evidence in various parts of The Sacred Wood that did not appear in print prior to
the publication of that volume in November 1920, just over a year later. But in the
published work of the intervening period-the period that opens with the Arts
League of Service lecture and the correspondence relating to The Art ofPoetry-
Eliot appears to invoke the term rather more circumspectly. In fact in the articles
and reviews listed in Gallup's Bibliography for the period October 1919 to October
1920 one looks in vain for a straightforward occurrence of the noun tradition used
in precisely the same sense in which it appears so abundantly in 'Tradition and
the Individual Talent' and the substantive sections of The Sacred Wood-in the
sense, that is, of the process of 'handing down' that connects writers of different
generations. Many readers will also conclude, presented with the handful of
30 See 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', 11-12. It will be noted, moreover, that Eliot's pri-
mary aim in introducing the idea of 'our "heritage" of literature' in his lecture is to suggest
that the poetic past is dependent for its continued 'life' upon the work of those that
continue to create poetry in the present. While this suggestion is by no means inconsistent
with the argument of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', it does assign the literary past a
rather more passive role in its relationship with the literary present than is envisaged in
the original statement of the theory of impersonality.
instances where Eliot employs the word traditional in his writings of this period,
that the adjective figures more unobtrusively, or is used with rather less rhetorical
emphasis, than the precedent of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' might have
led one to expect.31
In substantiating these assertions it is helpful to begin by considering Eliot's
use of the term in two uncollected pieces published during the summer of 1919,
just before the publication of the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'.
Commentators generally fail to acknowledge that 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' originally formed the final instalments of the sequence of causeries Eliot
contributed to the Egoist under the title 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry',
a series that actually began a full two years earlier in September 1917. In fact the
essay on tradition follows on directly from where the fourth instalment of this
series, published in July 1919, leaves off, its final sentence seemingly written with
half a mind to the possibility that the two pieces might one day be brought
together in volume form ('[o]ne ought properly at this point to revert to the
question of tradition...'). In this earlier 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry'
piece one finds Eliot using the term tradition in precisely the sense in which it
31 For the purposes of this discussion it seems reasonable to assume that in the period in
question Eliot's contributions to London-based journals (i.e. Gallup C84-C108, C109-
Cll6a) were composed roughly in the order in which they were published, many appearing
within two weeks of submission. In fact Eliot sometimes completed his contributions to
weekly papers like the Athenaeum and the TLS only a few days before publication. His
article 'Ben Jonson' (C99) was 'just finished' on Monday 10 November 1919 (Letters, 345-6:
346) and already in print in the TLS on Thursday 13 November. By 18 November Eliot had
composed two more reviews for the Athenaeum, namely 'The Comedy of Humours' (C100),
published 14 November 1919, and 'The Preacher as Artist' (C101), published 28 November
(Letters, 347).'Swinburne' (C104) was completed by Sunday 11 January 1920 (Letters, 354-5:
354) and published on Friday 16 January; 'Dante as a "Spiritual Leader"' (C109) was 'just
finished' on Sunday 21 March 1920 (Letters, 373-5: 374) and published on Friday 2 April.
With monthly and quarterly periodicals the gap between composition and publication
seems typically to have been somewhat longer, though it is hard to pin down dates of
issue precisely. The first draft of Eliot's contribution to the March 1920 issue of Harold
Monro's monthly the Chapbook, 'A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry' (C108), was
substantially composed in the period from Monday 16 February to Sunday 22 February and
revised after 4 March at Monro's request (Letters, 368, 370). This issue of the Chapbook
seems to have been in circulation by 24 March 1920 (see Letters, 376). On Wednesday 24
September 1919 Eliot wrote to Sydney Schiff promising that he would complete 'Some
Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe' (C89), his contribution to the autumn
1919 issue of the quarterly Art & Letters, by the end of the same week (Letters, 333).'"The
Duchess of Malfi" at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama' (C102) was published in the winter 1919/
1920 issue of Art & Letters and was occasioned by a Phoenix Society performance of
Webster's play given on 24 November 1919 (see "'The Duchess of Malfi"' Times, 25
November 1919, 10). Composition of Eliot's review was complete by 18 December 1919
(Letters, 351), and this issue of Art & Letters was in circulation before 26 February 1920,
when it was listed in the 'New Books and Reprints' section of the TLS (141-3, 143).
'Euripides and Gilbert Murray' (C107), published in the issue of Art & Letters for spring
1920, was a review of a performance of Medea given on or shortly before 8 March 1920
(see 'Miss Thorndike's "Medea"', Times, 9 March 1920, 14). This was in circulation before
13 May 1920, when it was listed in the 'New Books and Reprints' section of the TLS
(304-307: 306). In the case of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' there is a hiatus of several
months between composition and publication, but for reasons that should already be clear,
this is by no means a typical case.
376 PETER WHITE
would be made famous in The Sacred Wood. Here he describes the process through
which a first youthful 'passion' for another author, probably a dead one,
transforms the poet into one of the 'bearers of a tradition'. He also suggests that
contemporary poetry 'is deficient in tradition'.32 Though the passages in which
these assertions are made directly foreshadow the argument of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent', Eliot's next exploration of the idea of tradition-next in order
of publication and, in all likelihood, of composition--would actually appear in the
pages of a different periodical. It is found in an Athenaeum book review entitled
'Was There a Scottish Literature?', published on 1 August 1919. In this piece the
term tradition is used twice in relation to the idea of literature conceived as an
'organic formation', as a corpus of writings by authors who are related 'so as to be

in the light of eternity contemporaneous'. The notion of a trans-historical 'English
mind', clearly related to the idea of the 'mind of Europe' in 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' finds expression in the same passage.33 Thus though the first
part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' forms an obvious high-water mark in
Eliot's usage of the term-for the record it uses tradition eight times, including
once in its title, and traditional three--it is clearly continuous with the pieces that
precede it from a terminological point of view.
There is, it should be noted, no appreciable shift in Eliot's preoccupations as a
critic coincident with the subsequent change in his usage of the term alleged
here. The general insistence upon the interrelation of the new and the old in art
is central to a number of his contributions to periodicals published during the
months immediately following the appearance of the first instalment of 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent'. One actually finds a number of key elements from that
essay re-surfacing in other articles and reviews of the period-for instance there
are references to 'the European mind' in 'Euripides and Gilbert Murray' and
'Humanist, Artist, and Scientist'34, as well as a return to the idea of the poet's
'historical sense' in 'The Method of Mr. Pound'35 But in these pieces, as in
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', explicit references to 'the tradition' or 'a tradition'
are not to be found. Even in the second instalment of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent', almost certainly completed after the Arts League of Service
lecture, the term tradition is present only in the piece's title.
32 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]' Egoist 6/3 (July 1919), 39-40.

33 'Was There a Scottish Literature', Athenaeum, 1 August 1919, 680-1.
34 'Euripides and Gilbert Murray: A Performance at the Holborn Empire', Art and Letters,
3/2 (Spring 1920), 36-43: 37; 'Humanist, Artist, and Scientist', Athenaeum, 10 October 1919,
1014-15: 1014.
35 'The Method of Mr. Pound', Athenaeum, 24 October 1919, 1065-6: 1065: 'The "Seafarer"
was evidence of a much more extensive historical sense', cf.'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' Egoist (September 1919), 54-5: 55: '[Tradition] involves, in the first place, the histor-
ical sense' etc. The suggestion in the first of these pieces that 'Mr. Pound's early
work.., might give the impression of being a brilliant and immensely appreciative piece
of archaeology' (1065) seems to echo the end of the first paragraph of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' ('You can hardly make the word [tradition] agreeable to English ears
without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology' (54)).
In fact there are really only two passages in Eliot's published work of the period
between the appearance of the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'
and the completion of The Sacred Wood in which he invokes at all directly the
notion of tradition as a process of 'handing down' connecting writers of different
generations. One is in 'The Preacher as Artist', an Athenaeum review of Donne's
Sermons published on 28 November 1919. Eliot is drawing attention here to
'the single important defect' of Logan Pearsall Smith's introduction to this
volume, his failure to compare Donne's sermons with those of the other great
preachers of his time:
[T]he comparative study would educe [...] that a great deal in Donne's predicatory style is
traditional, and that some of the most praised passages are produced by a method which is
more than traditional, which is immemorial, almost imposed by the sermon form. Not
until we see this can we understand the difference between [...] Donne as an artist doing
the traditional better than any one else had done it, and Donne putting into the sermon
here and there what no one else had put into it.36
The second occurs in a brief discussion of William Blake's early verse in the piece
entitled 'The Naked Man' published in the Athenaeum on 13 February 1920:
The poem "Whether on Ida's shady brow" is eighteenth-century work; the movement, the
weight of it, the syntax, the choice of words-
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound isforcd, the notes are few!
this is contemporary with Grey [sic] and Collins, it is the poetry of a language which has
undergone the discipline of prose; it is not remote from Landor. Blake up to twenty is
decidedly a traditional.37
Some readers will find that the ideas about tradition implicit within each of these
two passages are essentially consistent and continuous with the particular notions
of tradition and the traditional advanced in the first part of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' Such readers will probably conclude in consequence that if
indeed 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' does witness an attempt on Eliot's part to
eliminate the term tradition from his critical vocabulary, then this attempt was at
most a rather sporadic or half-hearted affair. Other readers will find on the con-
trary that these instances of traditional do not readily assimilate themselves to the
over-arching theory of tradition found in the Egoist piece, that the connotations
of the word in each of these later contexts are more prosaic and more neutral than
is strictly compatible with the rather grandiose idea of writing 'with a feeling that
the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer [...] has a simultaneous order'
What is certain is that in neither 'The Preacher as Artist' nor 'The Naked Man'
is tradition quite the rallying cry it had been in the first part of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' and would be again in The Sacred Wood.
36 'The Preacher as Artist' Athenaeum, 28 November 1919, 1252-3: 1252.

37 'The Naked Man', Athenaeum, 13 February 1920, 208-9: 208. Note that Eliot excised the
phrase 'it is not remote from Landor' when preparing this essay for inclusion in
The Sacred Wood.
378 PETER WHITE
There are a handful of other uses of the words tradition and traditional found
elsewhere in the journalism of late 1919 and early to mid-1920, but none that
serves to contradict the idea that the term tradition in its fullest Eliotic sense was
somewhat out of favour with Eliot in this period. Thus there is a single passing
use of traditional in the passage of satirical high sport that forms the opening of
the short Athenaeum book review 'War-Paint and Feathers' (17 October 1919), but
most readers would probably agree that it is not one that serves to recall or
reinforce the polemic of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. Eliot is prefacing
his withering commentary on a volume entitled The Path of the Rainbow: An
Anthology of Songs and Chants from the Indians of North America with a discussion of
the Ustumsjiji, a 'vanishing race' that has taken refuge from religious persecution
'in the remote gorges of the Akim-Baba Range':
Here the explorer discovered them, and was privileged to hear their Shikkamim, or wander-
ing bards, prophets, and medicine-men, recite or chant, to the music of the pippin or one-
stringed gourd, the traditional poetry of love, warfare, and theology.
'The explorer', Eliot continues,'has made a translation or interpretation, in vers

libre, and the product is declared to be superior [...] to anything that can be
bought second-hand on Charing Cross Road'38 The fuller Eliotic connotations
of traditional are also absent in the passage in 'The Comedy of Humours' in which
Eliot describes Gregory Smith's strictures on Ben Jonson's dramatic method as
'just, as well as traditional' the implication being that Smith has merely repro-
duced the received wisdom on Jonson's shortcomings as a dramatist.39 Though
the noun tradition itself appears in 'Philip Massinger', it is used there merely as a
way of referring to some of the stock themes of renaissance drama, and without
any explicit reference to the notion of literature conceived as an organic formation
(it is said that Massinger 'inherits the traditions of conduct, female chastity,
hymeneal sanctity, the fashion of honour, without either criticizing or informing
them from his own experience').40 Finally, it is perhaps just worth noting that the
word tradition also appears in a statement by Anatole France quoted at the start of
Eliot's 'A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry': 'Criticism is the last of all
literary forms... It is admirably adapted to a very civilised society... whose tradi-
tions are already age-old'. (It may also be worth noting that Eliot describes this
statement as 'both false and pernicious'.)41

With the publication of The Sacred Wood the term tradition once again asserted
itself as a key term in Eliot's critical vocabulary, not only because he chose to
reprint 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in that collection, but also because
he introduced the term in several parts of the volume that did not appear in print
38 'War-Paint and Feathers' [a review of The Path of the Rainbow: An Anthology of Songs and
Chants from the Indians of North America, (ed.) G. W. Cronyn (New York, 1918)], Athenaeum,
17 October 1919, 1036.
39 'The Comedy of Humours', Athenaeum, 4672 (November 1919): 1180-1: 1180.
40 'Philip Massinger', TLS, 27 (May 1920), [325]-326: 326.
41 'A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry', 1.
prior to the submission of the manuscript to Methuen (on 9 August 1920).42 There
is, for instance, the introduction, where it is said that it is the business of the
critic 'to preserve tradition-where a good tradition exists'. In 'The Possibility of a
Poetic Drama', the piece which Eliot chose to place alongside 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent', there is a discussion of the dramatic tradition ('[b]y losing
tradition, we lose our hold on the present') in which the term appears no fewer
than five times. There is also a short passage added to the end of the essay 'Blake'
that includes references to'the Latin traditions' and to the 'framework... of tradi-
tional ideas' lacking to Blake. Within the context of The Sacred Wood these passages
can arguably be read as deliberate attempts to echo the terminology of 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent', in order, perhaps, to enhance the appearance of
continuity between the materials brought together in that volume. Though
'The Possibility of a Poetic Drama' and the introduction to The Sacred Wood
would appear as discrete articles in the pages of the Dial after the submission of
the manuscript to Methuen, both seem to have been written for inclusion in the
collection and, more importantly, with an eye to reinforcing the coherency of the
whole composition. This makes the sudden reappearance of tradition in them
rather suggestive.43
Were it not for the pointed eschewal of tradition in 'Modern Tendencies in
Poetry', there would probably be little warrant for attaching significance to the
altered profile of the word in Eliot's other published prose of late 1919 and the first
half of 1920. The fact that in the articles and reviews of this period it is used so
infrequently, and that when it is used it seems all but divested of the theoretical
and polemical freight with which it had been loaded in 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent'--these things could satisfactorily be explained in any number
of ways, e.g. as being consistent with a desire on Eliot's part to avoid the belabour-
ing of a favourite idea. As things actually stand, however, it is hard not to find in
the assembled evidence indications of two significant reversals in the term's
fortunes, the first coinciding with or just preceding the composition of 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry', the second associated with the final preparation of the
manuscript of The Sacred Wood. At one moment the word tradition seems an essen-
tial element in Eliot's criticism; the next, it is all but purged from it, only to be
subsequently reinstated as his critical battle-cry.
At this juncture it is important to emphasise that if Eliot did become dissatis-
fied in some way with the term tradition during this period, this dissatisfaction
probably outlasted and outweighed his positive enthusiasm for 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' and The Art of Poetry. As the preceding section of this
42 Letters, 399.
43 The Sacred Wood, xiii-xiv, 55, 143. For a more detailed discussion of the structure and
development of Eliot's Methuen volume see Peter White,'New Light on The Sacred Wood',
RES 54/216 (September 2003), [497]-515: 499-503. This article presents evidence to sup-
port the contention that at least some of the substantive sections of The Sacred Wood
were completed after 3 July 1920, only just over a month prior to the submission of the
manuscript.
380 PETER WHITE
study has attempted to make clear, Eliot's interest in his projected Egoist Press
volume seems to have waned by some point around the very end of January 1920,
whereas his re-adoption of the term tradition in his critical prose seems to have
taken place months later, as he worked on the manuscript of The Sacred Wood.
Clearly the correspondence relating to The Art ofPoetry is of great significance in
the context of a discussion of the changing usage of tradition in the journalism of
this period, because it tends to suggest that from November 1919 through to the
end of January 1920 it was far from certain that 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' would be reprinted as the definitive statement of its author's theory of
poetic impersonality, or even that it would be reprinted at all. It tends to confirm,
that is, that in this period the fortunes of this most Eliotic of terms were inex-
tricable from those of the essay that would eventually launch it upon the world. It
would be quite wrong, however, to conclude that the comparative absence of
tradition from Eliot's journalism of 1920 bespeaks an ongoing commitment on his
part to the idea of a volume-length amplification of his Arts League of Service
lecture. On the whole, Eliot's positive attachment to the idea of a cohesive and
constructed prose volume based on 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' seems to have
been a less decisive motive force than his evident dissatisfaction with the term
that that would subsequently come to be seen as lying at the centre of his post-
war critical project.
III
Although the sources of this ambivalence towards the term tradition must neces-
sarily remain a matter for conjecture, an examination of the immediate journal-
istic context of Eliot's early collected prose suggests one line of enquiry worth
pursuing here. For it cannot be wholly without significance in this connexion that
the same term had been used in a sense very similar to Eliot's in early 1919 by one
of the latter's acquaintances from the set associated with Garsington and
Bloomsbury, the art critic and theorist Clive Bell, and in the pages of the very
periodical through which Eliot would subsequently rise to prominence as a
reviewer. The first issue of the Athenaeum under John Middleton Murry's editor-
ship, published on 4 April 1919, carried Bell's essay 'Tradition and Movements' as
its Art column.44 Though he had written little journalism during the war, Bell was
already an influential figure in 1919, and his was one of the few signed contribu-
tions to that issue (which also offered Eliot's unsigned review of E. B. Osborn's
The New Elizabethans). 'Tradition and Movements' which marks the opening of the
highly productive post-war phase of its author's journalistic career, advances a
theory of tradition which has been likened more than once to the one put forward
in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. Commentators who have drawn parallels
between these pieces seem to have encountered 'Tradition and Movements'
44 'Tradition and Movements', Athenaeum, 4 April 1919, 142-44; Since Cizanne (London,
1922; repr. 1923), 74-82.
in Bell's 1922 collection Since Cizanne, the date of that collection prompting at
least one scholar to conclude that Eliot's essay influenced Bell in the formation of
this theory. In fact the publication of 'Tradition and Movements' in the Athenaeum
antedates that of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' by about five months.45
Though there is some evidence to suggest that the material expressed in the
first part of Eliot's essay enjoyed a relatively long gestation period, there is no
real reason to question the assumption that it reached its final form after the
publication of Bell's piece.46
Whereas the opening paragraphs of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' are
notionally concerned with what Eliot claims are the narrow and largely negative
connotations of the word tradition in discussions of English writing at that
moment ('you can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears'), Bell, in his
discussion of visual art, is able to use the term without hesitation or qualification,
is able to assume the existence of a tradition of painting, and without the implica-
tion of what Eliot calls 'some pleasing archaeological reconstruction'. Indeed,
considering the centrality of the term in each of these pieces, the opening
of Eliot's essay almost starts to look like an oblique allusion to 'Tradition and
Movements', with the statement that it is impossible to refer to 'the tradition'
or 'a tradition' of English writing acknowledging implicitly that it is perfectly
possible to speak confidently-as Bell had done-of 'a tradition', or 'the tradition'
of visual art.
It is worth noting that Bell's essay offers a number of superficial verbal

parallels with 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' that suggest a familiarity with
'Tradition and Movements' on Eliot's part. Eliot's phrase 'indiscriminate bolus',
for instance, looks very much like an echo of Bell's 'pseudo-philosophic bolus'.47
45 See Thomas M. McLaughlin, 'Clive Bell's Aesthetic: Tradition and Significant Form',
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35 (Summer 1977), 433-43: 'the parallels between
Bell's theory of tradition and that outlined by T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" are striking. In both cases the artist is pictured before the works of the past, which
assert their presence in every artist. In both Bell and Eliot the artist must create an original
work by means of his relationship with the tradition, so that the tradition can grow. Both
see the tradition as dynamic, changing as new aesthetic works enter it. A plausible case
could be made for Eliot's theory influencing Bell directly. Eliot's essay falls between Art and
Since Cizanne, the works which exemplify the major shift in Bell's position on Tradition'
(443, footnote 27). See also S. Fishman, The Interpretation ofArt: Essays on the Art Criticism of
John Ruskin, Walter Pater Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Herbert Read (Berkeley, 1963), 80: 'Bell's
doctrine is "classical" to the extent that it calls for an impersonal art. It bears a certain
resemblance to the ideas of T S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"' in
which a distinction is made between the personal emotions of the poet and his feelings
for the object which compose the true material of poetry' Note that Bell's volume
Pot-Boilers (see below) is not noted in Fishman's chronology of Bell's career (73-5).
46 For instance, certain key elements from the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' find expression in one of Eliot's letters to Mary Hutchinson dating from July 1919
(Letters, 316-8), mentioned below. In Selected Essays 1917-1932 (London, 1932) and
Selected Essays (London, [1934]), Eliot assigned 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' the
date 1917.
47 The Sacred Wood, 45, Since C(zanne, 82. According to Hannah Sullivan, bolus 'is a comical,
faux-scientific word (a bolus of food, passing down the oesophagus...) and it is precisely
the sort of word that Dora Marsden liked to employ in her essays on philosophy and
382 PETER WHITE
Also suggestive is the conjunction of three rather more inconspicuous words

from Bell's essay - monuments, modified and persists-in one of the most memorable
passages in Eliot's piece:
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty,
the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.48
Bell had written that the tradition of art is always 'being enriched and modified',
that it 'is a live thing that changes, grows, and persists'; he had also suggested that
under certain circumstances the artist 'will... come to feel an almost exaggerated
reverence for the monuments of the past'49 Clearly Bell's word monuments here
lends itself to Eliot's purposes, in that it evokes the idea of a literary tradition
quite as readily as it does that of a tradition of specifically visual art. There is,
however, a telling difference in the way the word is deployed in these two pieces.
In Bell's hands, monuments carries a suggestion of petrifaction, of the monolithic,
and seems to be used with an ironic overtone: only an 'exaggerated reverence' will
see works of art in this way. In the passage from Eliot's essay quoted earlier, it is
used without this inflection, an indication perhaps that this borrowing was not a
reflexive one on Eliot's part.
In attempting to understand the significance of this tissue of associations, it is
necessary to bear in mind the fact that the term tradition was already part of Eliot's
critical vocabulary when Bell's 'Tradition and Movements' appeared in the
Athenaeum in April 1919. It is very much in evidence in his piece 'A Note on Ezra
Pound' which was published in Holbrook Jackson's magazine To-Day in late 1918,
and is used there, moreover, in the context of notions that would subsequently
resurface in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' itself. For instance one finds in
this piece a statement of the idea that the cultivation of the 'historical sense' is
central to the poet's education.50 In other words it may well be that Eliot's evident
absorption in Bell's essay served merely to confirm the centrality within his work
of themes and preoccupations that were already present there. However it is also
worth noting here that 'Tradition and Movements' was not its author's earliest
exploration of the value and importance of tradition in the visual arts. In fact in a
piece entitled 'Contemporary Art in England' first published in the Burlington
Magazine in July 1917, Bell had actually touched upon the question of the English
and European literary traditions as well, contrasting what he saw as the 'insular-
ity' of British visual art with the receptiveness of English literature to continental
influences. 'English literature' Bell insists in this piece,'has a great tradition, one
that 'has never allowed itself for long to lose touch with the European current'.
human psychology' ['"But we must learn to take literature seriously": T. S. Eliot and the
Little Magazines of Modernism, 1917-1920' Critical Quarterly, 46/2 (2004), 63-90: 76].
48 The Sacred Wood, 44 (Eliot's emphasis). 49 Since C&zanne, 79.
50 To-Day 4/19 (September 1918), 3-9, 4 and passim.
'Contemporary Art in England' was one of the pieces reprinted in Bell's 1918
collection Pot-Boilers, which Eliot reviewed anonymously for the Egoist, so it is
far from improbable that 'A Note on Ezra Pound' was written after an exposure
to Bell's ideas on this score. Admittedly there is very little on the face of it to
connect 'Contemporary Art in England' with Eliot's contribution to To-Day other
than the use of the term tradition itself, and a shared impatience with English
provincialism; in fact Bell's contention that 'English literature has a great tradi-
tion' implies a point of view almost diametrically opposed to Eliot's ('there is so
little tradition in English verse...'). But perhaps in the light of the striking verbal
parallels between 'Tradition and Movements' and 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' one may be more inclined to see elements of continuity between these
two earlier pieces.
IV
The fact that Eliot's most famous essay appears to be situated in some form of
dialogue with the work of his Athenaeum associate is of course not without its own
interest, but it is not the most important observation to be made here. There are
in fact a large number of superficial points of contact between the pieces gathered
in Bell's Pot-Boilers and the articles and reviews collected in The Sacred Wood.51 In
the final analysis the correspondences in question are probably not so surprising
or significant as initially they may seem. Both men moved in the same circles, and
it is at least possible that some of their shared preoccupations reflected the
common currency of intellectual exchange within the particular social world
they inhabited. This anyway is one of the conclusions that might be drawn from
the fact that much of the argument of the first part of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' is anticipated by the contents of one of Eliot's chattier letters
to Mary Hutchinson, Bell's mistress, written in July 1919.52
The really intriguing thing here is that in 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' all
traces of any engagement with Bell's 'Tradition and Movements' disappear. Indeed
it is as though a deliberate attempt had been made to effect their removal, as
51 See C. Bell, Pot-Boilers (London, 1918), particularly 'Miss Coleridge' (41-9), which
begins with the proposition that '[t]he greatest art is, in a sense, impersonal', and
'Sophocles in London' (126-34), a review of a performance of Oedipus in a translation by
Gilbert Murray, which should be compared with Eliot's 'Euripides and Professor Murray'
(The Sacred Wood, 64-70). For Eliot's unsigned review of Pot-Boilers, see 'Shorter Notices',
Egoist 5/6 (June/July 1918), 87.
52 See Letters, 316-8. 'I think two things are wanted - civilisation which is impersonal,
traditional (by "tradition" I don't mean stopping in the same place)...- and culture -
which is a personal interest and curiosity in particular things - I think it is largely the
historical sense, which is not simply knowledge of history...' (317-8; Eliot's emphasis).
This letter was written at roughly the same time that the fourth of the 'Reflections
on Contemporary Poetry' causeries, a piece that clearly prepares the way for 'Tradition
and the Individual Talent', was printed in the Egoist. For Bell's relationship with
Hutchinson, see Q Bell and V Nicholson, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden
(London, 1997), 8, 19.
384 PETER WHITE
though at some point in September or October 1919 Eliot had become uncomfor-
table with the verbal echoes in question and was seeking systematically to rework
his poetic credo in order to silence them. Whether or not Eliot actually did
become conscious of having been too responsive to Bell's work must remain of
course a matter for conjecture. But the very fact that he was moved to rewrite
the first part of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' without using the word
tradition-an undertaking as bizarre and perverse in its way as a performance of
Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark-makes it seem far from preposterous or
unwarranted to speculate along these lines, as does the fact that he was moved to
reshape the contents of his essay in this radical way so soon after its publication.
The notion that Eliot had come to see the opening of 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' as being compromised in some way also supplies a rationale
for how it was that a piece as rough and ready in execution as 'Modern Tendencies
in Poetry' came to loom as largely as it did in his plans for his first prose volume.
For given that a far more polished and measured iteration of the same body of
ideas was already to hand in the form of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' the
prominence accorded to the lecture in his correspondence of the period appears
on the face of it something of a puzzle-even if one takes into account that at this
particular moment in time he was declaring himself 'averse' to the practice of
reprinting articles.
In any event if Eliot did become aware of having aligned himself too closely
with Bell's work, it is easy to see why he might have contemplated the act of self-
censorship that is implied by his avoidance of the term tradition in 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry'. At this point in his career he was only just beginning to
make a name for himself as a writer of criticism.53 He would almost certainly have
regarded as highly problematical anything in his own work with the potential to
expose him to the suggestion that he was working in the shadow of one of his
influential English contemporaries.54 Moreover there is ample evidence to suggest
that his relations with Bell in particular were far from straightforward, or at least
during this period. One does not need to follow all of the twists and turns of
Eliot's letter to his cousin Eleanor Hinkley of 17 June 1919 to see that personal
interaction between the two men was prone to awkwardness and misunderstand-
ing at this time.55 Some of this same social unease-or perhaps it was simply
rivalry--may even have played a role in determining what each was prepared
to say about the other in print. Eliot's portrait of Bell in his short unsigned
53 References to Eliot's work as a critic are few and far between at this time--possibly
there had been only two. See 'Experiments in Poetry', an unsigned review by
R. Aldington of the first issue of Coterie for the TLS (22 May 1919, 274) in which Eliot is
described as 'a distinguished critic of literature' What is almost certainly the earliest
reference to Eliot's critical prose appears in 'Re Vers Libre', the penultimate section of
'A Retrospect' in Pound's Pavannes and Divisions (New York, 1918), 95-111: 108.
54 Eliot was extremely sensitive to any suggestion of indebtedness to his English contem-
poraries: 'any poems of [Osbert Sitwell's] which appear to have any affinity with any of
mine were published subsequent to mine' (Letters, 378, 26 March 1920; Eliot's emphasis).
55 Letters, 304-6. See also Valerie Eliot's illuminating commentary on this letter.
Egoist review of the latter's volume Pot-Boilers is a far from flattering one, contain-
ing elements of caricature; Bell's extended 1923 piece on Eliot for the Nation and
Athenaeum is full of barbed praise.56 The fact that Wyndham Lewis saw this 1923
Nation piece on Eliot as an outright attack ('[t]he tone of it is so clearly
personal...') is perhaps hardly surprising, given his previous quarrels with its
author.57 All the same it seems fair to suggest that Bell's piece provides further
evidence of the kind of ongoing low-level animosity between them that might
have made Eliot uncomfortable about the parallels between 'Tradition and the
Individual Talent' and 'Tradition and Movements'.
Obviously if one does accept that 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' reflects some
form of dissatisfaction with'Tradition and the Individual Talent' on Eliot's part, one
must also swallow the idea that with the passage of time Eliot chose to reprint the
latter essay--without any significant alteration-as the centre-piece of his first
prose collection. But perhaps this is not as unlikely a reversal as first it appears.
For one thing, Eliot's distinctiveness as a critical voice was already far more widely
recognised when he came to prepare the manuscript of The Sacred Wood than it had
been when he wrote'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' In particular there had been the
controversy and column inches generated by his contribution to the March 1920
issue of the Chapbook,'A Brief Treatise on the Criticism of Poetry' which he could
justifiably have taken as a guarantee that literary London would not receive him as a
disciple of Bell or Bloomsbury.ss It is also useful to have in mind here a sense of the
pressure under which he worked to produce the manuscript of The Sacred Wood
during the summer of 1920.59 The urgency of the situation, combined with the fact
that he had only 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' to hand as a fully achieved
expression of his core poetic doctrines-these things would probably have made
the idea of reprinting the Egoist essay in his Methuen collection seem a very obvious
line of least resistance. Admittedly there is no reason to suppose that Eliot would
have been any more comfortable with the idea of being linked to Bell in the
summer of 1920 than he would have been when he wrote his Arts League of
56 In his article Bell even comes close to accusing Eliot of plagiarism, noting his 'discon-
certing habit of omitting inverted commas' when quoting other authors. In illustrating this
point, he draws attention to a line from the poem 'Cousin Nancy'-'The army of unalter-
able law'--and reminds his reader of its origin ('[y]ou know it is by Meredith'). It is a gibe
that appears to have rankled with Eliot, for in an interview given almost 40 years later in
1961 he related how a critic-whom he does not identify--had once 'accused [him] of
having shamelessly plagiarised, pinched, pilfered that line'. 'Whereas [...] the whole
point' Eliot went on to insist,'was that the reader should recognise where it came from'.
See 'Talking Freely: T. S. Eliot and Tom Greenwell' The Bed Post: A Miscellany of 'The
Yorkshire Post' ed. Kenneth Young (London, 1962), 41-53: 43-4, quoted in Ricks's preface to
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (London, 1996), xi-xxxiii: xxiv.
57 The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W K. Rose (London, 1963), 136.
58See A. C. Brock's unsigned review of the March 1920 issue of the Chapbook in the TLS
['The Criticism of Poetry', 15 April 1920, 236]; J. M. Murry's leading article for the same
paper ('The Function of Criticism', (13 May 1920), [289]-290), also unsigned; 'The Function
of the Critic', Spectator, 17 April 1920, 525; H. J. Massingham,'The World of Books', Nation,
29 May 1920, 282, and B. Dobree,'Contemporary Songsters', Daily Herald, 5 May 1920, 7.
59 See Letters, 379, 388.
386 PETER WHITE
Service lecture in late 1919. Indeed the 'Lewis-Bell controversy' of March 1920,
acted out in the correspondence columns of the Athenaeum, had intensified his
antipathy toward the author of 'Tradition and Movements' so considerably that
he had been moved to denounce him in extremely strong terms in one of his
personal letters to a mutual associate, Ottoline Morrell.60 But perhaps the very
obviousness of the similarities between 'Tradition and Movements' and
'Tradition and the Individual Talent' was, paradoxically, Eliot's surest guarantee
that they would not be dwelt upon by his readers, and that no such link with
Bell would be imputed to him. For it is only in the context of 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' that the similarities between Eliot's theory of tradition
and Bell's really begin to look like indications of something more significant
than a passing affinity between two otherwise distinct critical positions.
Certainly, any reader unaware of Eliot's ambivalent relationship with the term
tradition in this period is liable to find these similarities to be a relatively trivial
or superficial matter.61 It may not be so very fanciful to suppose, then, that in
order to conceal his intimacy with Bell's work Eliot ultimately resorted to the
sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.62
This study has concentrated only on those aspects of 'Modern Tendencies in

Poetry' that appear to illuminate 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' in some
way. It has attempted to show that the process leading to the inclusion of Eliot's
most famous essay in The Sacred Wood was a good deal more complex than has
hitherto been suspected, and that Eliot's attitudes toward that piece in the
months immediately following its appearance in the Egoist were in all likelihood
decidedly ambivalent ones. In pursuing this limited aim it has not been possible
to give a full account of all of the substantive elements of 'Modern Tendencies in
Poetry' or to explore fully the ways in which this intriguing document might be
used to shed light on Eliot's conception of his unwritten Egoist Press volume
The Art of Poetry. This is unfortunate, because certainly there is much in the
lecture that is of interest in this connexion. For instance there has been no
opportunity in the preceding paragraphs to note that in its final movement
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' articulates a theory of artistic expression that
appears to be lifted directly from the oft-quoted passage at the end of 'Hamlet
and His Problems' dealing with the role of the 'objective correlative' in art.63
60 Ibid. 373-5. 61 See e.g. Peter Ackroyd, T S. Eliot (1984; London, 1993), 107.
62 Cf. Poe, 'The Purloined Letter' Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London, 1953),
203-227: 223.
63 Louis Menand appears to have been the first scholar to note this. See L. Menand,
'T. S. Eliot; The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet, C. Rawson
(Cambridge, 1989-), VII: Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, L. Menand
and L. Rainey (2000), 17-56, 30, for Menand's earlier etc. recognition of the connexion
between 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' and 'Hamlet and His Problems', see the references
But this is clearly a fact of some importance, since it might be taken as evidence
that in The Art of Poetry Eliot planned to revisit the most resonant theoretical
pronouncements from his occasional journalism and marry them together in
some more sustained and cohesive system of ideas about the creation of poetry.
In any event the recapitulation of these ideas speaks volumes about his sense of
himself as a theorist at this time. An equally important aspect of the lecture that
passes unremarked in the paragraphs above is that it is concerned specifically
with contemporary verse, and adduces as examples of 'modern tendencies' in
verse poems that had first come under its author's scrutiny when he was writing
his 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry' causeries for the Egoist.64 These last
facts are suggestive because they serve to suggest one of the ways in which
The Art of Poetry probably differed in conception from The Sacred Wood. For
though much of Eliot's early collected prose is notionally concerned with the
'present problems of art'65 none of it ever quite recaptures the same sort of
engagement with the realities of contemporary verse and poetic experimentation
(vers libre, prose poems, imagism, Dada, Georgian poetry, etc.) found in the bulk
of his more notable contributions to the Egoist and in his two contributions to the
'Miscellany' section of the New Statesman. The testimony both of 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' and the correspondence of the period is that The Art of
Poetry would probably have been closer, in terms of its stylistic mode and subject
matter, to these earlier Egoist and New Statesman pieces than to the later articles
and reviews that set the prevailing tone of The Sacred Wood. But the question of
what these tantalising insights into Eliot's conception of The Art of Poetry reveal
about his early development as a critic must be pursued elsewhere.
Appendix A. TheText of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'

Readers of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' owe its preservation not to its author,
who seems to have been relatively indifferent to its fate, but to one of the repre-
sentatives of the Arts League of Service. The basis for this assertion is an aside in
one of Eliot's letters to his mother, dated 10 November 1919: 'I have sent [the
lecture] off to the Secretary of the Arts League of Service, who wants it for a
at the end of 'Objective Correlative' an entry in The New Princeton Encyclopedia ofPoetry and
Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, T. V. F Brogan, Frank J. Warnke, O. B. Hardison Jr, and Earl
Miner (Princeton NJ, 1993), 848. See also Badenhausen, T S. Eliot and the Art of
Collaboration, 44-5.
64 The two poems adduced in the lecture as specimens of 'Emotional' and 'Unemotional'
verse--James Stephens' 'The Snare' and Tristan Tzara's 'Le Geant Blanc Lepreux du
Paysage' respectively-had both been quoted in different instalments of the sequence of
four causeries Eliot had contributed to the Egoist under the title 'Reflections on
Contemporary Poetry' from late 1917 to late 1919. Eliot had quoted the first two lines from
the third stanza of 'The Snare'--'Making everything afraid/Wrinkling up his little face'-
in the first instalment, noting how often the word little occurs in Georgian poetry
['Reflections on Contemporary Poetry', Egoist 4/8 (September 1917), 118-119: 118]. His very
brief discussion of Tzara's work appeared in 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]',
Egoist 6/3 (July 1919), 39-40: 39.
65 'The Local Flavour', The Sacred Wood, 29-34: 33.
388 PETER WHITE
Review in India.'66 Of course for anyone interested in the process that led to the
lecture being published in Madras, this apparently simple statement prompts a
number of questions, not the least pressing of them that of the identity of the
person responsible for passing Eliot's manuscript (or more probably typescript) to
the editor of Shamaa. In fact by 1922 the League boasted no fewer than three 'Hon.
Organising Secretaries', their names being Ana M. Berry, Eleanor M. Elder and
Judith Wogan.67 All of the various different records of the League's activities make
it clear that Berry was responsible for arranging the 'Modern Tendencies in Art'
lecture series, and on the basis of the testimony of these sources alone she would
appear of the three the candidate most likely to have been responsible for arrang-
ing the publication of Eliot's text.68 Her claim appears to be strengthened by the
fact that she would subsequently call, in a contribution to the Arts League ofService
Annual 1921-1922, for an 'international propaganda whereby the work of our con-
temporary artists can be made known abroad'69
The matter does not rest there, however. Additional evidence brought to light
during the preparation of this study points compellingly to Eleanor Elder as the
main link between Eliot and Shamaha. The revelation that goes some way to sup-
plying a context for the publication of the lecture in Madras is that Elder was
involved-how peripherally it is difficult to determine-with the activities of the
Theosophical Society. Prior to the formation of the Arts League of Service she
had spent time at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, in
Madras, and it was on the fringes of that world that Shamaha appears to have
been conceived. According to one contributor to the Theosophist, the Society's
journal, Elder was remembered in the community at Adyar for having devised
during her stay there an entertainment consisting of 'some charming illustrations
of Greek dancing and some delightful Indian playlets'70 She herself contributed
to the Theosophist whilst in Madras and was the author of a pamphlet entitled
Dance A National Art published in Adyar in 1918 by the Theosophical
Publishing House.71 This latter document formed part of a series of booklets
66 Letters, 346. The fact that in the sentence that follows this extract Eliot states his
intention of producing 'a small book' based on his lecture makes nonsense of Ronald
Schuchard's assertion that the submission of the manuscript for publication in Shamah in
some way put an end to his plans for The Art of Poetry ('the director of the Arts League of
Service, which had sponsored the lecture, whisked ['Modern Tendencies in Poetry'] off to
India for publication in the first number of Shamah', effectively removing it from
circulation'). See Eliot' Dark Angel, 200.
67 See The Arts League of Service Annual 1921-1922 ([London, 1922]), 1.
68 See E. Elder, Travelling Players: The Story of the Arts League of Service (London, 1939), 28
and A. M. Berry,'A Survey: Some Younger Artists and the A. L. S' Design and Art (London,
1928), 46-55: 50.
69 See 'The Artist and the Nation' The Arts League of Service Annual 1921-1922,
([London, 1922]) 27-31: 27.
70 'On the Watch-Tower', Theosophist 44/11 (August 1923), [499]-505: 503.
71 E. Elder, Dance: A National Art (Adyar, Madras, 1918) and 'Movement, and the Culture
of Expression' Theosophist 39/6 (March 1918), [616]-631.
that featured contributions by two authors, Harindranath Chattopadhyay and

James H. Cousins, whose work would subsequently appear alongside 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' in the first issue of Shamahi in 1920. Shamah itself was
published in Adyar, and had another Chattopadhyay, one Mrinalini
Chattopadhyay, as its editor and publisher. Though there is nothing to suggest
that it was produced under the auspices of the Theosophical Society, during its
first few years it was printed at the Vasanta Press, which was founded and owned
by none other than Annie Besant, President of the Theosophical Society from
1907. Whether or not the text of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' bears out one
comment in the pages of the Theosophist concerning 'a deficiency in the type' used
at the Press at Adyar ('some of the type [...] are old; but Dr Besant cannot afford
to replace them'),72 the present author is not fully competent to judge. What is
more certain however is that Shamah was the product of a milieu that Elder knew
well, making it seem highly probable that she was responsible for conveying
Eliot's lecture to its publishers. If she was, then it seems in turn that her motives
for doing so would have had more to do with a wish to assist her Adyar associates
in their quest for copy than with a desire to preserve and promulgate Eliot's work
per se. During her association with the League Elder concerned herself principally
with its travelling theatre companies, and in Travelling Players, her volume-length
history of the League, she gave scant attention to the 'Modern Tendencies in Art'
lecture series.73 The publication of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' like its redis-
covery forty years later, seems to have been a happy accident.
As for Eliot, he apparently knew little of Shamaih, and seems to have attached
little significance to the appearance of his work in its pages. Indeed, there is some
evidence to suggest that he would not have released the text of his lecture for
publication in England, or at least not in the form in which it survives. On the
31 October 1919 he wrote to his friend Edgar Jepson, who had been present at the
lecture a few days before, to acknowledge the validity of certain reservations about
'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' that the latter seems to have voiced from the floor
on the occasion of its delivery, adding: 'I don't want that lecture to go to press in
this country until it has undergone your criticisms'74 The tone of amiable defer-
ence in Eliot's letter is a consistent feature of his correspondence with Jepson, and
it seems altogether unlikely that Eliot took his associate's comments-whatever
they may have been--quite as seriously as he suggests. The two men seem to have
cordially disagreed on most issues-the significance of the literary legacy of the
Elizabethans, e.g.-and there is nothing to suggest that Eliot did press Jepson for
his criticisms of the lecture. All the same it might be concluded from this remark
that he did not regard 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' as either finished or worthy
of publication in the form in which it survives, and that its appearance in Shamah
was clearly a matter of some indifference to him.
72 See C. Jinarajadasa,'Our Cover', Theosophist 54/7 (April 1933), [111]-113.

73 Travelling Players, 28. 74 Letters, 343.
390 PETER WHITE
A similar conclusion can be drawn from an oblique but suggestive aside in one
of Eliot's letters to Mary Hutchinson from this period almost certainly connected
with the publication of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' in Shamah: 'was it I gave
you the Hindu Magazine? But it is much more praiseworthy than the [London]
Mercury'75 According to Valerie Eliot the date of this reference to the 'Hindu
Magazine' is 14 January 1920, several months before the appearance of the first
issue of Shamaa (in April of the same year), meaning that Eliot would have to be
referring here to a proof copy or sample received considerably in advance of pub-
lication, forwarded to Hutchinson and promptly forgotten about. As far-fetched
as this may at first seem, it is difficult to see what other periodical this might be a
reference to, and it is worth noting that the word magazine in Eliot's letter seems to
pick up on the full title of Shamah (which announced itself on its cover as A
Magazine ofArt, Literature and Philosophy). Certainly the conjecture that Eliot treat-
ed any advance proofs with negligence would go some way to accounting for the
state of the published text of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', which is marred in a
number places by some rather obvious typographical errors (as the following
garbled sentence testifies: 'But as Ernest Bowson [sic], like a Lionel Johnson, is
at heart a conservative, putting all his romance into his life: England has been
plagued with poets of this type').76 Furthermore the idea that Eliot forwarded his
copy of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' directly to Bell's mistress-all the while
cultivating an air of indifference as to its fate-is rather a seductive one, at least in
the context of the hypothesis about 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and
'Tradition and Movements' ventured earlier.
At any rate it seems safe to conjecture that Eliot invested little time revising
and otherwise preparing the text of his lecture for the press. No change was made,
e.g. to a reference in the second sentence of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' to
'forty sweating millions in these islands' which clearly addresses itself to
the audience assembled in Westminster rather than to the readers of a
Madras-published literary magazine (as was noted above, the editor of Shama'a
made no attempt to explain the provenance or context of Eliot's piece). What
discrepancies there are between 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' and a brief
account of the occasion of the lecture's delivery that Eliot gives in one of his
letters to his mother are slight and do not support the idea of revision between
delivery and publication. He told her that he had avoided mentioning living poets
by name and that he been careful to disappoint those who had come to hear him
condemn Rupert Brooke or praise Ezra Pound, whereas in 'Modern Tendencies'
he explicitly gives credit to Pound for his leadership of 'the better poets' in their
studies 'in various foreign literatures. But perhaps in the face of (as he put it)
75 Ibid. 357.
76 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry', 13. Could it have been Eliot's tone in dealing with
Dowson that provoked Jepson, with whom Eliot otherwise enjoyed very cordial
relations, to criticise the lecture? The warmth of Jepson's admiration for his friend
Dowson, and his distaste for his detractors, is apparent in 'A Postscript from the
Nineties', the prologue to his Memories ofan Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (London, 1937).
'a hostile chairman and a hostile audience' he chose simply to depart from his text
by omitting the very brief parenthesis mentioning Pound.77
There is one other piece of external evidence relating to the text of 'Modern
Tendencies in Poetry' that needs to be dealt with here. It is found in a brief
account of the 'Modern Tendencies in Art' lecture series contributed by Ana
Berry to a 1928 Arts League of Service publication entitled Design and Art, a
piece entitled 'A Survey: Some Younger Artists and the A. L. S'. The main value
of this article for the purposes of this study is that in it Berry chose to reprint a
series of 'special paragraphs' contributed by the 'Modern Tendencies in Art' lec-
turers and others to the 1920 issue of the Bulletin of the Arts League of Service,
discussed above.78 Among these paragraphs is a characteristically trenchant quo-
tation from Eliot consisting of three relatively short sentences on the connexion
between failures of poetic technique ('the careless word, the soiled ignoble
phrase, the vulgar or languid or violent choice and order') and other types of
deficiency ('confused intellect, impure feeling, and defective moral organisation').
This quotation is presumably what Gallup has in mind when he refers to a 'five-
line excerpt' from Eliot's lecture printed in the 1920 issue of the Bulletin (see the
entry on 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' from the Bibliography reproduced above),
though in fact the sentences in question do not form part of the Shamaa' piece.
With this last fact in mind it is initially tempting to conjecture that this quotation
bears fragmentary witness to a part of Eliot's lecture not recorded in the printed
text found in Shama', raising the possibility in turn that 'Modern Tendencies in
Poetry' is not wholly reliable as a guide to the lecture that was to have formed the
'nucleus' of The Art ofPoetry. On further consideration however it begins to seem
more likely that all of the 'special paragraphs' in question were written to order,
specifically for inclusion in the Bulletin, and had no direct connexion with the
lecture series. A single sentence attributed to Eugene Goossens in Berry's piece
is not found in the published text of Goossens's own contribution to the 'Modern
Tendencies in Art' series,79 and the sequence includes other provocative quota-
tions by figures such as John Middleton Murry who did not participate in the
lecture series at all. Certainly most of the 'special paragraphs' have the pithiness
and concentration of self-contained utterances, while Berry's phrase 'special
paragraphs' itself to some extent militates against the idea that the passages in
question were extracted from more extended statements of their authors' points
of view.
77 Letters, 346.
78 Design and Art, 46-55: 46: 53. Berry gives the year of issue of the Bulletin as 1919.
79 Modern Tendencies in Music (London, 1919).
392 PETER WHITE
Appendix B. Chronology
4 April 1919 Bell's 'Tradition and Movements' published in the Athenaeum

11? July 1919 Eliot's letter to Mary Hutchinson on 'tradition' and the
'historical sense' (Letters, pp.316-8)
18 July 1919 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]' published in July issue
of the Egoist before this date (see Letters, p.321); in it Eliot raises
'the question of tradition'
I August 1919 'Was there a Scottish Literature?' published in the Athenaeum
(discusses the nature of a literary tradition)
9-31 August 1919 Eliot in the Dordogne with Pound, 'not [...] doing any writing'
(Letters, p.325); first instalment of 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' composed before or after this period
September 1919 First instalment of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' published
in September Egoist
c.28 September 1919 Eliot finishes writing 'Some Notes on the Blank Verse of
Christopher Marlowe' the first in a long sequence of prose pieces
in which the term tradition is not used (Letters, p.333)
c.17 October 1919 Eliot at work composing 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'
(Letters, pp.343-344)
28 October 1919 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' delivered at the Conference Hall,
Westminster
5 November 1919 First reference in correspondence to'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'

as 'nucleus' of projected volume-length work (Letters, pp.343-344)
10 November 1919 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' sent to Arts League of Service
before this date (Letters, p.346); text omits the term tradition
18 December 1919 Eliot describes 'Tradition and the Individual Talent II' as
'just finished' (Letters, p.351)
December 1919 The Art of Poetry promised to readers of the last Egoist 'for the early
spring'; this issue includes 'Tradition and the Individual Talent II'
14 January 1920 Eliot refers to 'Hindu Magazine' (Shamaah?) in letter to Mary

Hutchinson (Letters, p.357)
25-26 January 1920 Final references to The Art of Poetry in Eliot's correspondence
(Letters, pp.357-360)
22 February 1920 Eliot in negotiation with Sir Algernon Methuen regarding
'prose book' (Letters, p.368, p.379)
April 1920 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' published in maiden issue of
Shamah
10 April 1920 First reference in correspondence to agreement with Methuen

(Letters, p.379)
9 August 1920 Eliot submits manuscript of The Sacred Wood to Methuen

(Letters, p.399); includes 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and
new material employing the term tradition
4 November 1920 Publication of The Sacred Wood (Gallup, Bibliography, p.28)

A - White - Tradição e Talento Individual Eliot

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'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Revisited

Author(s): Peter White

Poetry', namely the greater prominence of the art-as-science analogy in the

5 Ibid. 167, note 4.

Eliot's contribution to Shamah was first brought to the attention of scholars in

6 See D. M. Walmsley,'Unrecorded Article byT. S. Eliot' Note 139 in 'Bibliographical Notes

9 15 July 1920, 458, under the heading 'Art'.

17 Letters, 343-4: 343; 5 November 1919.

The opening movement of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry' appears, on first

These vaguely inelegant and uncomfortable substitutions tend to confirm that

well-known piece this seems to be a latent assumption rather than an explicit

'organic formation', as a corpus of writings by authors who are related 'so as to be

32 'Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV]' Egoist 6/3 (July 1919), 39-40.

36 'The Preacher as Artist' Athenaeum, 28 November 1919, 1252-3: 1252.

'The explorer', Eliot continues,'has made a translation or interpretation, in vers

statement as 'both false and pernicious'.)41

It is worth noting that Bell's essay offers a number of superficial verbal

Also suggestive is the conjunction of three rather more inconspicuous words

This study has concentrated only on those aspects of 'Modern Tendencies in

Appendix A. TheText of 'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'

that featured contributions by two authors, Harindranath Chattopadhyay and

72 See C. Jinarajadasa,'Our Cover', Theosophist 54/7 (April 1933), [111]-113.

4 April 1919 Bell's 'Tradition and Movements' published in the Athenaeum

5 November 1919 First reference in correspondence to'Modern Tendencies in Poetry'

14 January 1920 Eliot refers to 'Hindu Magazine' (Shamaah?) in letter to Mary

10 April 1920 First reference in correspondence to agreement with Methuen

9 August 1920 Eliot submits manuscript of The Sacred Wood to Methuen

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