A “Peculiarly American” Sense in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While conceding that Eliot had in mind the American “individualism” that Emerson “elevated […] into self-reliance and radical social consciousness,” Oser refutes David Bromwich who reads “Tradition” mainly “as a manifesto for the individual talent of avant-garde critics” (46). Instead, Oser contends, Eliot’s assertion in “Tradition” that “‘to conform merely would be for the new work not to conform at all’” offers a dialectic wherein he “arrives at a potent critique of Emersonian thought – namely, that it is undialectical” (“Tradition” 107, qtd. in Oser 63). As Oser further explains, “The chief social corollary of Eliot’s aesthetic is that individualism had closed and the door to a common culture” (64).

2. As Miller points out, Eliot wrote “The Hawthorne Aspect” for Pound’s James memorial issue of The Little Review just seven months after his own James issue for The Egoist (294).

3. The women in these earlier poems and in “Prufrock” are largely based on Adeleine Moffatt, who hosted teas for Harvard students and whom Conrad Aiken dubbed “‘the Jamesian lady of ladies’” (Gordon 37). Years later, when deciding not to pursue a romance with Hale – in spite of clearly regretting their lost time – Eliot would articulate his position in what Gordon calls an “unmistakably Jamesian” manner, particularly resonant with the Notebooks in which James describes “‘some friendship or passion or bond – some affection long desired and waited for, that is formed too late? – I mean too late in life altogether’” (422–423).

4. Sigg proposes that James’s definition of “applied” or “operative” irony, which “‘implies and projects the possible other case’” might offer a more accurate view of Eliot’s “sarcasm and scabrous irony” that other critics might dismiss in “their failure to see or imagine the positive pole upon which such negativity relies as a countervailing, if silent, partner” (James, The Art of the Novel 222, qtd. in Sigg 68–69; Sigg 68).

5. In a letter dated November 22, 1917, for example, Eliot writes to his father: “You mentioned money. I find I have £55 from you this year, and if I could have the other £10 of the rent I should be very grateful. I shall run pretty low shortly (on my current account) and the rise in my salary and the first installment on my lectures does not come until January […] Will you cable the money?” (Letters 234). To his mother in a letter dated January 17, 1918, Eliot mentions that he is thinking of getting a spring suit as “the prices are rising and materials getting so scarce” (Letters 248). She appears to have sent him some funds to help with the costs, as in his letter dated May 10th he writes: “In your last letter received Saturday you ask me whether I got the £10 you sent me for my suit. I did, and I am sure that you will have got my letter thanking you for it by this time, but I will thank you again to be sure” (Letters 263).

6. Although Eliot did not meet the physical requirements for active service, he along with all other Americans living abroad were required to register or risk conscription in the British Army. Desperate to secure a position that would allow him to remain in England, he pursued multiple leads throughout the summer and fall of 1918. While the most promising of these seemed to be the U. S. Naval Intelligence position, that promise soon faded after his application was delayed due to confusion over where he was registered. Eliot recounts in a letter to his father dated November 4th, 1918: “They had assumed here that I was not registered. But I pointed out to them that under the Convention every American of draft age is registered in England, and that Americans who had failed to register are automatically liable for service in the British Army, and the American Government has no further claim upon them; that therefore, the cablegram was incomprehensible. Then they applied to our Army here, who could cast no light on the matter, and said they had no claims upon me” (Letters 288). This back-and-forth seems to have continued until just before the Armistice; Eliot writes to St. John Hutchinson in a letter dated November 10th, “I am at work again having given up the Navy as a bad job – this ends my patriotic endeavors” (Letters 297).

7. Eliot would become a British subject nearly a decade later, in 1927.

8. While Miller mentions the review signed Enrique Gomez and observes that the memorial issue includes “only four articles on [James] filling not quite four pages” he does not make the connection between Eliot’s mention to Hinkley that he was having difficultly finding writers and the fictitious author and translator of the Gomez review (293). Gordon does attribute the Gomez review to Eliot, but it was not officially included as part of Eliot’s complete prose until Brooker’s and Schuchard’s attribution (Gordon 502).

9. Eliot explains: “When the two gasses previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum” (Prose vol. 2, 109).

10. “Emotion recollected in tranquility” is excerpted from Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800): “I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from

emotion recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth, qtd. in Notes for “Tradition,” Prose vol. 2, 114).

11. Eliot was given this epithet by the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1932, shortly after his arrival in Boston. See Ronald Schuchard’s and Jason Harding’s “Introduction” to Volume 4 of The Complete Prose (x).