|Swan House (above), traditionally known as one of the most recognized and photographed
landmarks in Atlanta, is an elegant, classically styled mansion built in 1928 for the Edward H.
Inman family, heirs to a cotton brokerage fortune. The mansion, designed by famed Atlanta
architect Philip Trammell Shutze, provides a glimpse into the lifestyle of this Atlanta family
during the 1920s and 1930s. - Atlanta History Center|
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T.S. Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, should be taken into consideration when critiquing poetry, but I think it has more to do with certain elements involving the manner in which a poet expresses himself. However, if both the poet and the critic were to heed the words of Eliot, the poet could form a poem and the critic view the poem in the manner Eliot describes: "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones. . . .to express feelings which are not actual emotions at all." (p 961) It is not the expression of personality or emotions but the escape from either/both. But one must have these things to know what it means to want to escape these things. If a poem can cause the audience to pause and for a moment feel what the writer is trying to convey by the tone the author has set or by the way the author employs the use of light verse darkness as depicted in the passage he uses to indicate this (p 960), the author then can move the audience to feel something without the prose often seen in the Romantic tradition.
I think Eliot's conception of tradition is fluid because tradition is something that involves a sense of history, which Eliot writes "compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature (of Europe)" when combined with his voice, "composes order." Each literary work I have read up to now has in some way influenced me, which Eliot suggests is embedded in my conscious. Even current (contemporary) writing adheres to past tradition. Even with a contemporary tone, it still compares to past tradition because current writing is a reflection of the writers experiences, reflecting his or her time and place in history. Eliot wrote, "Someone said: The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did! Precisely, and they are that which we know." Anyone who has ever read a dead poet, has been touched in some way, regardless of whether one enjoys or loathes the writing. To believe that one knows much more than they - those who come before us, one will not be able to wholly appreciate the poet/writer who has come before him. The contemporary writer will be judged by (compared to) the standards of the past.
"The historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal (and the two combined) is what makes a writer traditional. . . .And it is also what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity." (pp 956-570) The past and present are at once, compared to one another and together are reconciled by the poet. Thus the critic should also have a keen awareness of both the present and the past.
Source: Cain, Finke, Johnson, Leitch, McGowan, Sharpley-Whiting, and Williams. The Norton
Anthology of Theory & Criticism. 2nd Ed. Published by WW Norton and Company, New
York/London. 2010.