ESSAY – JAVA & VERSE
What if greatness in poetry isn’t about your feelings, but your ability to disappear? T. S. Eliot thought so. And he said it with the intellectual force of a literary wrecking ball.
The Essay That Keeps Haunting Me
An English professor once handed me a stack of literary theories, as if they were polite interventions. I was emotionally raw, so naturally, I assumed the worst. One of the texts was T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent—a dense, icy essay I’ve come back to over the years, especially when I start thinking my writing is getting good.
Spoiler: Eliot never lets me feel good for long.
Tradition: Now with 90% More Dead Guys
Eliot opens by dragging the English for treating “tradition” as a brag or an excuse to never change. He’s not here for that. For him, tradition isn’t a safety blanket—it’s literary CrossFit. You don’t inherit it; you earn it. You read so much Dante and Shakespeare that their ghosts start charging rent in your brain. That’s Eliot’s idea of a “historical sense.”
“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”
If you’re not writing while haunted by the canon, Eliot’s judging you from his perch in the great library in the sky.
Your Poem Isn’t That Special
Next, Eliot drops the literary version of “you didn’t build that.” Your new poem? Cute. But it only matters in relation to what came before it. Tradition isn’t a one-way street—it’s a remix. Every time you drop a new metaphor, the canon must make room, like a snobby dinner party where you just showed up in a hoodie. The past adjusts—but only if your work is good enough to make it flinch.
Kill Your Ego, Save the Poem
Now for Eliot’s hottest take: great poetry isn’t about you. It’s not your diary entry. It’s not your breakup in verse. The poet should be like platinum in a chemical reaction—an invisible catalyst. You cause the emotional explosion, but leave no trace of yourself.
“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
Your angst? Irrelevant. Your personality? A liability. Eliot’s poetic hero is the anti-snowflake: invisible, ego-free, and built like a Greek grammar book.
He’s not just dunking on confessional poets—he’s challenging the cult of authenticity. Writing as therapy? Valid. Writing as art? That’s a different game. Great poetry doesn’t wallow in feeling; it refines it. And yes, it takes someone deeply emotional to understand the need to flee from emotion. Cue the mic drop.
Feelings? Meh.
Eliot closes by swinging at sincerity. Feeling something doesn’t mean you’ve written something worth reading. You can mean every word and still write a dud.
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.”
The emotion belongs to the poem, not the poet. So if you’re writing about your fifth breakup in six months, maybe skip the sad-girl sonnet and channel Ovid’s exile or the fall of Rome instead. Just a thought.
Final Thoughts: Eliot vs. Instagram Poets
In a world obsessed with “finding your voice” and “speaking your truth,” Eliot reads like a literary curmudgeon with a PhD in gatekeeping. But there’s a weird freedom in his elitism. He doesn’t want you to be original—he wants you to be excellent. That means burying your ego, studying like a maniac, and writing like you’ve time-traveled through the entire Western canon.
So, don’t ask, “How do I feel next time you write?” Ask, “Would this make Virgil roll over in his grave?”
And if that sounds exhausting, good. Eliot didn’t write for quitters. He wrote for ghosts with PhDs.
This post was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #378
Memoirs of Madness 