Modernism and T.S. Eliot

¶ … modernist aesthetic theories developed at the beginning of the twentieth century brought a whole new perspective upon art and literature. Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Joyce, among others, were the promoters of new aesthetic concepts that made art into something impersonal and elitist, rather than the expression of personal emotions or experience. A piece of art is born out of the sedimentation in the mind of the poet of multifarious life or thought experience, of the type that is not necessarily seen as significant by the common man who has never written poetry. In the same way, according to the modernist views, art became not only impersonal but also elitist and abstract, full of numberless erudite allusions. The new was to be built on tradition and the palimpsest technique became almost an indispensable tool for the modernist artist.

Thus, T.S. Eliot strongly affirmed in his famous essay called Tradition and the Individual Talent that the emotion of art is impersonal, and that this emotion is to be found in the poem itself and not in the history or the biography of the poet:

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all." (Eliot)

Here, the distinction between poetry and emotion lies clear enough: art can not be defined simply as the process of translation of certain emotion or inspirational thoughts into words. The emotion of poetry is not the same as the human emotion, it is something that can be expressed when the poet "surrenders" himself completely to the poem he creates, that is when he withdraws from reality and the emotion that can be felt in real life situations, and surrenders himself to his own creation:

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living." (Eliot)

In the context of the impersonality of art, another aesthetic concept used by Eliot can be explained- that of the "objective correlative," or the way in which the artist creates emotion in poetry or art in general:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. " (Eliot)

The emotion is to be expressed artistically through the whole range of details that make up the situation or place or events in the work of art, that is, the emotion of art is, once again, impersonal since emotion is expressed by means of something objective.

Eliot continues his essay with his praise of artistic tradition, instead of originality which was thought, of old, to be the essential condition of great poetry. Every new work of art should be based on cultural tradition, and every writer should have what Eliot calls a "historical sense," that is a sense that will allow him to perceive everything that was created before him simultaneously:

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. " (Eliot)

His theory regarding tradition becomes clear if one looks at Eliot's own poetical works, almost all of which are palimpsests of different other authors and works. In his Waste Land, T.S. Eliot states again the simultaneity of all cultural facts and at the same time, their lack of coherence:

Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only heap of broken images, where the sun beats (...)" (Eliot)

Similarly, there are other modernist concepts affirming the importance of technique for the modernist writer. One of these is W.B. Yeats' concept of dance, as a form of art that can very well be a poetic art in itself. If Eliot thought that the emotion of art is expressed by means of an "objective correlative," for Yeats emotion and the essence of art was to be found in symbolism, and especially in mythical or folkloric symbolism. Like Eliot, Yeats goes against such literary trends as realism or naturalism, and thinks that the ancient myths and folklore are an undeniable source for literature:

have met with ancient myths in my dreams, brightly lit; and I think I allied to the wisdom or instinct that guides a migratory bird." (Yeats, VIII)

Great art is not created according to what the author may observe in the surrounding reality, but according to more profound and "intimate" facts, that can be reached through either a rich memory of tradition or through the imagination. This theory is corroborated by his aesthetic concept of the dance, as Yeats remembers it from the staged Noh Japanese theatre:

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative passions because they did not live within our own strait limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos (...)" (Yeats,178)

The ecstasy and the rhythm of dance are, according to W.B. Yeats the most important features of great poetry, as the symbolic movement and the passion of dance betray and are also able to transmit a withdrawal to the intimacy of the inner world, as the poet describes it from his recollection of a Japanese play:

There, where no studied lighting, no stage-picture made an artificial world, he was able, as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting cross-legged, or as he threw out an arm, to recede from us into some more powerful life. Because that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind. One realised anew, at every separating strangeness, that the measure of all arts' greatness can be but in their intimacy. " (Yeats, 224)

His concept of dance and the dancer is also illustrated in his poem Among School Children:

chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance? " (Yeats)

The subtlety of the dance consists, like the subtlety of good poetry, in the rhythm that engages the dancer so completely as to make him one and the same with the dance. In the same way, in poetry the rhythm of the poem and the message and possible the thoughts of the reader too, will express all the same grace of movement like that of the dance. The emotion of art is thus, according to Yeats, created trough movements that are similar to the dance movements, through a receding from immediate reality and a focus upon oneself, while also gathering in the dance a tumult symbols and mythical elements.

Likewise, Ezra Pound put forth another modernist aesthetic theory, which was founded on the concept of imagism. He proposed that emotion always creates a pattern in the mind of the author, and thus, the work of art is created following that pattern:

Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind-if the mind is strong enough. Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units, or units of design. (I do not say that intense emotion is the sole possible cause of such units. I say simply that they can result from it. They may also result from other sorts of energy.)(..)" by pattern-unit or vorticist picture I mean the single jet. The difference between the pattern-unit and the picture is one of complexity. The pattern-unit is so simple that one can bear having it repeated several or many times. When it becomes so complex that repetition would be useless, then it is a picture, an 'arrangement of forms'.

Not only does emotion create the 'pattern-unit' and the 'arrangement of forms', it creates also the Image." (Pound, 374)

Thus, in Pound's view, the image and the pattern of emotion that leads to it is much more than a simple idea or thought: