Summary
Poet and critic whose early essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” opens Chapter One, I of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism: acknowledgment is made in the book’s copyright page for permission to reprint the essay from Selected Essays (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.3, p.31 / printed p.4).
Details
- Eliot says the poet works within a tradition that cannot be merely inherited but can only be obtained “by great labour”, and defines the historical sense as a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence (PDF p.31 / printed p.4; the copy garbles both nouns, so the phrase is given without quotation marks).
- “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” (PDF p.31 / printed p.4).
- Said’s use and qualification: Eliot’s vision of literary tradition respects temporal succession without being wholly commanded by it, and his central idea — how we formulate or represent the past shapes our understanding and views of the present — is valid; but his synthesis of past, present and future is idealistic, a function of his own peculiar history, and leaves out the combativeness with which individuals and institutions decide on what is tradition and what is not, what relevant and what not (PDF p.31 / printed p.4).
- Said recalls Eliot’s words again when arguing that the meaning of the imperial past is not totally contained within the era of high nineteenth-century imperialism but has entered the reality of hundreds of millions of people (PDF p.39 / printed p.12).