The Impersonal Theory and Its Use in the Waste Land
The Impersonal Theory and Its Use in The Waste Land
In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent that published in 1919, T. S. Eliot first comes up with his Impersonal theory of poetry. He is in the belief that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”(Eliot 203). He insists that it is in the depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.
Eliot’s Impersonal theory is composed of two aspects. In the second part of Tradition and the Individual Talent he points out that:
In the last article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. (Eliot 203)
To sum up, the Impersonal theory concerns both the poem’s relation with other poems especially the great poems in poetic tradition and its relation with the author. For Eliot, if an author wants to be impersonal when writing a poem, on the one hand, he needs to be traditional, developing the consciousness of the past and taking poetry as a living whole; on the other hand, he has to try to get rid of his personal emotions that is based on his own experiences.
1.1 Intersection with Tradition
For Eliot, art never improves. What has been changing is just the material. The difference between the present and the past, in his words, “is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which he past’s awareness of itself cannot show” (Eliot 202). Since the best things for poetry are already there with the great ancestors, the value of a poet or work of art does not lie individually but should be measured by tradition, in other words, by seeing whether it is fit into tradition or not. The really valuable works are always in accordance with the tradition. To conform to tradition, the first and most important thing a poet should do is to develop historical sense. He states in his Tradition and the Individual Talent, “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot 201). Only by developing this historical sense, a poet can be traditional. And being traditional means a continual surrender of oneself and gradual extinction of personality, which is just what Eliot thinks as the progress of a poet.
The Waste Land connects to the great poetic tradition and other poems mainly by using allusions. An allusion is a brief