Edmund Burke Wood

Transcription

What relationship should a poet have with the poets of the past? Some argue that art is a self-portrait. But others believe the contrary – that all art forms part of a collective whole, and each writer stakes out their place on this continuum. The American poet T.S. Eliot published a collection of critical essays in 1920 called The Sacred Wood. They made an important contribution to this debate, discussing several theories of how writers should write. In one essay, titled ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot argues that poets must be mindful of past tradition – or the poetic canon – when they write – he believed that no truly original work can ever be created by ignoring it. At first glance, the argument seems contradictory…is it really true? Let’s imagine a tennis player with talent, athleticism and superb hand-eye co-ordination. She’s grown up on an island where she’s the only tennis player. She has racquet and balls, and a book of rules – the grammar of the game. But the rules don’t tell her the most effective strategies for play. She’s on her own when it comes to working out what those might be, because she’s never seen a great player play. Let’s assume our tennis player invents a completely new sort of stroke – an effective shot that might give her the upper hand if she ever faces off against someone from a mainland tennis academy. Eliot would argue that’s not enough. In his view, for all her gifts, the island girl has no chance of ever being a tennis great. That’s because Eliot thought the skill and ability needed to become a superb player was only one part of the equation. To be successful, Eliot says ability must be married to education – in this case, a knowledge of the way tennis has been played throughout history. That way, a player can learn the strategies and techniques that past players used successfully. Denied access to all that education, our island player will never be more than a gifted amateur. We can now begin to understand how Eliot perceived tradition. For him, real artistic creation and original thinking cannot exist within a vacuum – it must be a fusion between past and present. Eliot thought tradition must be alive in all good writing. He saw poetry as an art in flux, constantly changing … a fluid process of interchange in which ‘tradition’ is influenced and modified by what comes next … to create an organic body of work, the ‘living whole’. The Sacred Wood looks at the role of the writer, historical precedence, creative individuality and emotion. A more detailed examination of Eliot’s ideas can be found in the MACAT analysis.