T.S. Eliot

Every semester that I teach American lit with the Heath Anthology, I assign T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It always makes my students mad: they want literature to be about the author -- they usually want to know if the "story is true," by which they mean did the writer experience what s/he is writing about.

If the story does not come out of the writer's direct experience, my students often decide they don't like it or don't find it valuable. It's a weird perversion of the notion of "truth" because it ignores the power of human imagination, the most creative force we know/have.

So I assign this Eliot essay after they've also read part of two other critics: William Dean Howells, in "Criticism and Fiction," insists that a writer's world/experience *must* be conveyed in literature and is what gives the literature its value [Howells's "regionalists" or "local color" writers). Henry James, in "The Art of Fiction," conveys that an author does not have to have the experience, but can "glimpse" one and then use imagination to build a story.

Eliot seems to be a logical progression from these two, and he readies us for the 20th century and modernism (not to mention postmodernism!). I find that most students want to stay in the steady 19th century, though, with its emphasis on realism and naturalism. It's my duty to get them unstuck.

Eliot helps! He insists that powerful poetry is not about the personality of the poet -- or even the emotional experiences of the poet. Instead, the poet's mind is like a catalyst in the presence of two substances: feeling and emotion. The talented poet brings these together in some memorable way to create a poem that can take its place in the poetic tradition.

I very much like this idea, which focuses on the art instead of the artists. I guess I'm a New Critic, huh? Or rather, a fan of rhetorical analysis instead of biographical criticism.

[WEIRD! NPR's "All Things Considered" just quoted T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" as I was typing this!!]