In T.S.Eliot’s “
Murder in the cathedral”, Thomas Beckett is visited by four tempters. The
first three represent earthly pleasures, priestly power and temporal power. The
fourth temptation, to see “eternal grandeur” in martyrdom is unexpected.
Beckett must die without taking pride in his sacrifice and without hopes for
apotheosis. His death must not be an imitation of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ
for mankind. This concern and hope surrounding sacrifice and apotheosis was an
essential element of Modernism. The loss of faith with advent of science left
people disillusioned, in a state of existential crisis. Humans needed heroes to
believe in (because God, as Nietzsche exclaimed was dead in their minds). This
absence of heroes or the loss of old ones gave rise to the existentialist
movement, revival of pantheistic search for the ‘god in man’ and an obsessive
expectation of discovering and celebrating the god in oneself. The concept of
tragic sacrifice is essentially linked at subconscious level with the idea of
hermetic apotheosis.
T.S.Eliot’s essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”
exemplifies this modernist concern with self sacrifice and the possibility of
self apotheosis. “The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality.” This view suggests that poet does not
express his personality through poetry but only a particular medium. He is
attacking the view of romanticism that poetry is produced ‘by a man possessed
by more than usual organic sensibility’. Eliot places poem above the poet. He
argues that the poem must be valued for merits in itself and not in connection
with poet’s personal life. Poetry, for him is an escape from personality and
not an expression. Poet must submerge his own feelings and experiences into the
feelings of the subject of his poetry. An examination of historical position of
Eliot as a poet in early 20th century shows that he belongs to an
age concerned with self sacrifice. Thus the impersonal theory of poetry is an
explicit attempt to sacrifice the poet for the poem, in imitation of sacrificing
oneself for the ‘truth’ or one’s belief like Jesus and Socrates. It is an
attempt to discover the lost sense of ‘divine’ and placing it within oneself.
All poets have fought with the idea of nature and
God being superior to them. All have attempted to overcome the concern about
mortality with innovation, in their poetic ability to create and control
fictional worlds like gods.
“We can make our lives sublime,
And departing,
leave behind us
Footprints on the
sands of time.” (H.W.Longfellow)
The Greeks called poets ‘Vates’, which meant
a maker or creator. They believed that poet is capable of creation, though
inferior to the divine and attributed a likeness with the divine to the poet.
The loss of faith in god after enlightenment triggered a lack of faith in
writer as the omniscient creator whom we could trust. Modernist poetry reflects
this lack of faith in creation and creator (poet) by resorting into
fragmentation, concentrating on individual images rather than totality of a
construction. The depersonalization Eliot talks about is the critical
theorization of the Modernist poets’ concern with their own artificiality and
lack of genuineness as ‘personal’ imitators of the impersonal and universal
nature.
Another concern of
Eliot’s essay or the major concern is regarding the negativity attached with
the term ‘tradition’. The terms ‘Tradition’ and ‘Traditional’ are generally
used in a derogatory sense. But with T.S. Eliot, they are hallowed with
historical and cultural stream from antiquity to modern times. The poet, he
says, must have a historical sense, which is a sense of timeless and temporal
and of timeless and temporal together. He says that no poet has his complete
meaning alone. His significance can be judged only in comparison with other
writers, particularly his predecessors. A great poet must submit himself to the
stream. He must understand that his role is minor in this huge plan. This idea
of individual talent being important only ‘in time’ and in the stream of
tradition is similar to the impersonal theory in that both diminishes the
importance of role of the poet as an individual. His talent lies in his ability
to address his time (temporality) as much as his poetic genius which addresses
the timeless. This idea also sacrifices the individual talent and ‘self’ of the
poet for the history and tradition of poetry. Again the medium is preferred
over the expression of individuality.
The attitude of the
essay towards emotions in poetry is also important. Eliot says that
‘significant’ emotion is the emotion which lives through the poem, not the
poet. Besides, he advocates use of ‘ordinary’ emotions experienced by all and
not individual or new emotions. He talks of poetry like a scientist who invents
new chemicals. He talks about ‘fusion of elements’ in poetic medium and
stresses the importance of concentration in working out the correct formula.
These show how much science had infiltrated and corrupted poetry with doubts
about its own existence as a form of pleasure by the 20th century.
After enlightenment, religion and poetry had to reconcile with science. They
could no longer match the all-explaining force of new scientific method.
Criticism itself is a product of scientific examination of poetry using reason.
By the Modernist era, religion had become only a matter of faith and not reason
anymore. Eliot’s attempt to theorise poetry in scientific terms ironically
admits the superiority of science without which even poetry cannot be defined
anymore.
He also stresses the fact that the man who suffers
must be distanced from the poet who creates. (This idea of self not being one
is also scientific in origin.) The poet has only a temporary existence
dependent on his creation. It is the man who suffers, who really exists. In the
suppression of the real self of the poet and undermining the importance of his
personal emotions, Eliot sacrifices the poet again for the sake of poetry. This
is another evidence for his concern with self- sacrifice.
The prototype of modern heroes- Hamlet- is also an
example of this apprehension towards self sacrifice and eventual apotheosis. He
is more concerned with the act of ‘becoming’ a hero in tragic death (self
sacrifice in a sense) than with the act of revenge. His death is less of a
tragedy and more of an apotheosis in the sense that he became an emblem for the
generations of young men who thought of themselves as victims with possibility
of attaining divinity through death. Death for them was less of a ritual
sacrifice and more of suicide. “To be or not to be” became the biggest concern
of young men for centuries. Harold Bloom, in “Hamlet: Poem Unlimited” says that
Hamlet is the source of Romantic self consciousness. Modernist poetry in many
ways is heavily influenced by the self conscious hero model. Death for them is
ritualistic and has embedded possibilities of apotheosis, which would possibly
help the overcome the priority of nature and their own mortality. Eliot’s
theorization is at once an expression of and reaction against this idea in the
collective unconscious of Modernism. The Hamlet-ian self consciousness is the
source of reaction against hope for apotheosis in self sacrifice. Eliot uses
this awareness in his attempt to overcome the fourth temptation of ‘eternal
grandeur’. He should submit his ‘self’ to the art of poetry without hoping to
be part of the tradition, without hoping to be enshrined and worshipped like
Shakespeare, Hamlet or other literary gods.
