In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot argues that the greatest art is impersonal. His position is undermined by subsequent statements on art as an expression of personality and by his own richly “personal” poetry. This article explores the pattern behind Eliot’s concept of impersonality and its philosophical grounding in his graduate studies in philosophy, arguing that he accepts the simultaneous existence of opposites and sees them as resolved in a dialectical process that at once includes and transcends contraries. The details of this dialectical process vary from artist to artist. Eliot identifies four variations: two in the “Tradition” essay and two in the 1940 memorial lecture on Yeats. The present essay illustrates these variations from the work of four writers Eliot admired – Pound, Joyce, Conrad, and Yeats.

Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita at Eckerd College, has held visiting appointments at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and (in the fall of 2014) Merton College, Oxford. She is co-editor of two volumes of Eliot’s Complete Prose (2014, 2016), and has published nine books, including Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990, coauthor, J. Bentley), Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), and T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews (2004). She has received numerous awards and served as president of the South Atlantic MLA and as a member of the National Humanities Council.

updated: July 19, 2014