Some threads…

…of thought, woven together from recent reading, commingling in a weird trans-generational pub crawl of literaria.

First, there was yesterday’s post on Toynbee, where, somehow, T. S. Eliot’s use of peculiar found its way into the discussion via “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that wonderful essay laying out his aesthetic approach and his “peculiar” cult of impersonality.

Then this, from the Preface of Anthony Hecht’s On the Laws of the Poetic Art:

“It would be less than honest of me to ignore the fact that most ars poeticas and doctrinaire statements by poets about poetry are likely to be, whether consciously or not, defenses of their own habitual practices as poets. Eliot’s criticism, especially ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ is now increasingly seen as an apologia for his poetry and his personal sensibility; and this is the more ironic since that particular essay proposes the importance of the ‘impersonality’ of the poet.”

And, then, just a few days ago, the Catholic journal FIRST THINGS posted an interesting essay on its blog by Edward T. Oakes, which sought to explore the idea of a canon, particularly as it applies to philosophy and theology. In it he alluded to the following quotation from philosopher Mortimer Adler, who, clearly, drank Mr. Eliot’s kool-aid:

“St. Thomas has no more a system of philosophy than Shakespeare has a point of view or a message. In Shakespeare’s poetry nature is imitated so well, so properly, that all the wide world is presented to us with artistic objectivity. So, too, in the philosophy of St. Thomas the world is laid before us; his thought about it is diaphanous, a perfect medium of vision. In both cases, the art conceals itself by performing its task so well.”

These are very powerful ideas, far-reaching in their scope and influence. While the specifics of Eliot’s ‘artistic impersonality’ have long been dismissed by self-regarding literary critics, the basic idea, in various modes and flying various colors, persists in some quarters. Look, for instance, in Adler’s formulation (and this was the 1930s!), how quickly Shakespeare himself is turned into a Modernist in good standing, the presumption being that “diaphanous thought” is the sine qua non of artistic achievement.

The suspicion that Eliot was barking up the wrong tree haunted many subsequent poets and artists and yielded up a few generations of navel-gazers who were all too content to invert Eliot as their starting point. But anti-Eliot is no more right than Eliot; extreme self-consciousness is no better than Eliot’s dispassionate cultural pastiches. That Eliot’s attempt to root out ‘corruption’ in literature’s family tree became itself a corruption is noteworthy, but I am less certain what it notes.

“Diaphanous thought” is a lovely concept, although it is not quite itself.