In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot articulates the need for a continuity between the past and the present with respect to the production of art. More specifically, Eliot argues that true genius only surfaces when the new creation is able to perpetuate, but at the same time, permute, the “existing order” (“Tradition” 37) that constitutes the undergirding framework of the artistic realm. Despite the prima facie curiousness of this stance, it is in fact an exemplification of the modernist’s sentiment with regards to the role and function of the ideal poet. Sheer ambition and creativity alone are insufficient; the prerequisites for this vocation are far more stringent. In fact, before this could even be considered as a potential occupation choice, one must first understand that the poet is not a solitary, independent existence. Bearing upon his shoulders the vast and eminent tradition that precedes him, the poet shares an inextricable relationship with his literary predecessors as he strives to innovate in his artistic projects.
Absolute novelty – that which is completely divorced from existing structures, concepts and materials – is an impossible, if not, illogical, ideal to begin with. Everything, including that which is believed to be idiosyncratic (one’s phenomenological experiences, for instance), is mediated, and therefore, diminished by language the moment it emerges into consciousness. And because language—whether written, spoken, or even that which is tactilely experienced—is the conduit by which most, if not all forms of expression, communication and comprehension transpires, the intent to detach from this larger dimension of historicity is but a childish denial and defiance, never to achieve fruition.
Moreover, while the nascent poet attempts to set himself apart by severing all connections to the “the dead poets, his ancestors” (“Tradition” 37), this approach is self-refuting because the means of success ultimately operates on an epistemological mechanism which he desires to eradicate. In the first place, the artist must already be familiar with existing literary masterpieces such that past ideas would not be repeated in his creation. However, this insistence to find and take root in a new artistic terrain is already an affirmation and concession to the trajectory of the past. Because he does not want to overlap with existing content, the amateur poet is forced to find unchartered areas, and shun paths already taken. Difference for difference’s sake in this instance is shown to be futile, because it inadvertently conforms to the proper method of art production, as established in “Tradition.” Nevertheless, compared to the informed artist, the journey of the budding poet is rendered unnecessarily difficult by his misconceptions that ultimately restrict his creative freedom.
On another note, knowledge on the part of the readers is also presupposed in the model of the naïve artist, once again highlighting its inconsistency. Indeed, even if the “tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else . . . [is merely a] preten[sion] to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man” (“Tradition” 36, emphasis mine), one needs to already possess knowledge relating to past and existing literary norms and canons in order for this pseudo-admiration to be conducted. If, on the other hand, the amateur poet expects that his work be applauded for the mere sake that it is completely alien to his audience, then his attitude towards literary production could hardly be said to be genuine, and it is highly unlikely that this individual would even be welcomed into the ranks of the poets. Blind appreciation as such is obviously without value, since a nonsensical utterance composed of a made-up language would be given the same commendation, and no serious artists, except perhaps the con-artist, would actually derive satisfaction from this farce.
Nevertheless, this startling truth is no cause for one to descend into desolate resignation; according to Geoffrey Hill and T. S. Eliot, the presence of an existing system of language and literary history is an empowering source that serves to bolster the morale and simultaneously, the artistic prowess of the budding poet. While “[tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (“Tradition” 37), at the minimum, the new poet is able to evade the aforementioned point of being limited in his creative ventures. Rather than engaging in the arduous task of seeking unexplored grounds, the poet could certainly re-tread the paths of old. Repetition and conformity are useless; the individual has to undergo a rigorous intellectual preparation, which involves amalgamating his creativity with much studying, appreciating, analysing and internalising the works of his “forefathers” (Hill XXIX) before he could even attempt at creating proper art. Ultimately, both Mercian Hymns and Four Quartets, which take the genre of the Künstlerroman, seek to show that
no poet, no artist of any art, has his meaning completely alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (“Tradition” 37)
In fact, the attainment of this realisation not only inaugurates one’s achievement of the label, “talent,” as established in Eliot’s essay, it is also the benchmark by which the budding poet could be said to have finally mellowed, and is ready to embark on a journey to find his own artistic voice. This paper thus seeks to track Hill and Eliot’s appropriation of time in the Künstlerroman in their attempt to explicate the function and responsibility of the ideal poet to potential artists. In particular, the artist-to-be needs to align himself with the modernist view that the “re- / liable” (Hill XXIII) poet is more than a mouthpiece that merely articulates “superficial notion[s] . . . in the popular mind” (DS II). Even as he navigates the beauty, opacity and slipperiness of language, his words must be engaged and communicated in a most scrupulous and accountable manner such that the veracity of his observations or messages could be transmitted without being diminished.
As elucidated by Laurent Dubreuil, “[t]he human mind is not a ‘blank slate’” (70). Human beings are conditioned by their “biological constraints” (70), upbringing, immediate surroundings and a plethora of other factors. Even innocuous statements that merely articulate one’s likes or dislikes are a result of such a posteriori experiences. In this sense, rather than the tabula rasa, the palimpsest is perhaps a more accurate description of the state of human consciousness, because the surficial manifestations would always, and would continue to be marred by the traces left behind by one’s experiences, regardless past, present or future. To exacerbate matters, language, which has come to constitute one’s entire experience of the world, contributes most to the mass of inerasable traces on the surface to the extent that any new idea would necessarily be perceived in conjunction with the smidgeons in the background, which at once diminishes the perceptivity and singularity of the work itself. The system of language, which precedes and entrenches the individual, is always at least partially determinative in his generation and questing of meaning. Any form of artistic expression, even that which is solely illustrative, as long as it involves a conscious mind, would always be subjected to the limitations of language, and by extension, the artistic tradition that relies on the same conduit. In short, to use language is to acknowledge, and concede to the presence and influence of a greater tradition, and the poet, whose livelihood revolves precisely about using this tricky medium to appeal to his readers, would have to acknowledge this irrefutable fact. Since
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still (BN V)
the poet, who is endowed with the ability to affect readers’ thoughts and perception, would have to ensure that his compositions are able to bypass, or perhaps diminish, the unreliability of language, such that his message would be rendered precisely to his readers. In other words, the intended meaning of the poet should be readily comprehensible to the readers.
To highlight the genre of the Künstlerroman, however, Eliot and Hill deliberately shroud their poems with a veil of obscurity to translate the sense of confusion experienced by the beginner poet as he embarks on the journey of self-discovery to the readers. In this case, meaning, rather than being easily accessible, has to be painstakingly derived. But this is not a careless act. By problematising the ease by which the poems could be understood, the modernists seek to exempt their works from the valency of language, and ensure the veracity of the poetic contents and meanings, as intended by the authors. After all, if meaning could not be easily understood, then it is less likely to be subjected to misinterpretations. Eliot achieves this through the substantial use of philosophical claims and paradoxes, and in fact, Four Quartets epitomises Dubreuil’s observation that “[p]oetry incorporates cognitive dissonance and draws on non-consistent logical reasoning” (77, emphasis given). Similarly, Hill’s random alternation between two different narratives—that of Offa and an unnamed poet figure’s—often leaves the readers in a state of bewilderment as well. As the poems progress, however, mystification gives way to clarity, and the readers, much like the ignorant poet, are able to obtain “epiphanies” (XII) at the end. Given that one’s position on the linear time stream plays a huge component in affecting one’s perspective on chronological events, in the sense that one who is situated in the present or future would tend to disregard the relevance of occasions or individuals in the past, the poets compel the re-examination of time in Four Quartets and Mercian Hymns on the part of the readers.
Contrary to the usual methodology engaged by the coming-of-age genre, however, the poets enact a drastic modification on the temporal axis in Mercian Hymns and Four Quartets to reconfigure the commonplace perception of time, which, in turn, demands a similar attitudinal change on the part of the beginner artist. In the case of Four Quartets, just as the persona undergoes a gradual, if not radical, attitudinal transformation with respect to the movement and experience of diachronic time, the budding poet is likewise confronted with a similar realisation: “for history is a pattern/ Of timeless moments” (LG V) – novelty, as an attempt to entirely dissociate itself from the past, is insufficient and unnecessary for literary greatness. Since tradition is an ever-expanding series that flourishes, rather than perishes with time, one’s capacity to supplement to this schema of evolving, albeit immortalised, historicity is the true mark of talent.
Given that language, the very basis upon which literature is predicated, is facilitated by a syntagmatic, and therefore, chronological configuration, it could also be said that the persona who philosophises and struggles with time is, to some extent, a surrogate for the novice artist within Eliot’s musical milieu. In order for the aspiring poet to attain the ideal state of artistic maturation as demanded by the Künstlerroman and as endorsed in “Tradition” (to be recognised as talent), he must first come to terms with the unorthodox organisation of time that the persona encounters and eventually internalises as the actual order of things, at least within the literary universe.
On this note, while they could be regarded as interchangeable equivalents for the most part, an unsurmountable gulf exists in the persona-poet duo due to their ontological disparity. Like the medium through which he subsists, the persona is essentially an immortal construct exempt from human finitude, while mortality stands as an imminent possibility for the artist. For every reading (and rereading) of the poem, the persona is birthed, reborn, or resurrected, but each elapsed moment simply draws the artist-to-be closer to an irreversible, inescapable, perhaps even an undistinguished—if he is still entrenched in the bog of literary amateurism—death. When coupled with the fact that the primary taxonomy—“Four Quartets”—which unites the four poems already evokes the musical, and therefore, time and death, since a melody is basically a continuous unfolding and extinguishing of musical notes in the temporal dimension, it appears that Four Quartets also seeks to establish a parallelism between the human condition, the figure of the artist and the approach by which art should be generated.
By naming the series as such, Eliot also confiscates its poetic privilege—of immortality—when he demands that the poems be viewed as a melodic whole, because music, like the human poet, tends towards death from the instance it is birthed. In this case, the paradoxical statement, “[i]n my beginning is my end” (EC I) is at once evoked and illuminated. From an alternate viewpoint, however, perhaps the modernist seeks to close the ontological gap between the persona and the artist by elevating the stature of the latter. If the poet could be to some degree conflated with the persona, then he would likewise be exempt from the ravages of time since he would be preserved within the eternality of the literary tradition. In other words, because “[w]ords move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die” (BN V, emphasis mine), Eliot seeks to emancipate the artist-as-talent from the limited condition of humanity by giving him the opportunity to insert his name into the immortalised artistic canon that precedes him. If successful, the artist now possesses the prerogative to transcend the marginal state of “only living,” like “words” and “music”, and evade, to a certain degree, the cruel fate of death since works of talents would forever be memorialised and recorded in the literary tradition.
Despite its time-dependent element, poetry, or rather, its fundamental structure remains relatively “[s]empiternal” (LG I), for which literary predecessors are not “superannuate[d]” (“Tradition” 38) due to the mere fact that they occupy an earlier position along the temporal axis. While diachronicity has come to emerge as the conventional, if not quintessential, method of tracing and organising events within common reality, at essence, it is but a construct that has been arbitrarily privileged as paradigm. Within the modernist’s domain, however, this perceived temporal linearity is challenged and subverted by the inherent synchronicity of language, explicated through the preponderant interspersion of paradoxical claims in the poetic series, which serves to infuse a vein of scepticism towards putative assumptions that dominate the pre-reflective dimension in which the readers and novice artist reside.
In the end, the endeavour towards the unattainable “still point” (BN II) is abandoned when the persona arrives at the realisation that “What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning” (LG V). If anything, Four Quartets gestures towards a circularity in the trajectory of time which could be approximated by the image of a burgeoning, ever-rotating “vortex” (EC II). After all, when situated in an unceasing loop, notions of “beginning[s]” and “end[s]” are immediately rendered obsolete due to the ever-changing positionality which literally dis-orients the persona and the artist. Furthermore, when viewed from the side, it is the case that the magnitude of the actual distance traversed would always be inaccurately perceived, undervalued in fact. If there is only a slight movement along the disc’s arc, only minimal vertical displacement—if any—would be observed, and even if several revolutions are made, rather than the actual circumferential distance, one would only register the slighter horizontal displacement that has occurred. Nevertheless, Eliot’s modification, rather than exploiting, is instead an attempt at bypassing, or at least, ameliorating, the effects of human biological inadequacies; although the body remains subject to the ravages of linear time, the mind, upon being opened to the possibility of a circular timeline, would recognise the contingency of temporal positionality, and as a result persists in a state of relative youth. An outlook as such is maintained in a state of rejuvenation, for which weariness associated with seeking new ways of composing art is warded off, to a certain extent, and perhaps, this is the crux to ensure the constant proliferation of literary production.
In the first place, the “still point” (BN II), which is the locale “[w]here past and future are gathered” (BN II), represents the ever-elusive, ungraspable moment that is the present. Indeed, the current moment is always a dynamic, transitional state that eludes any attempt for one to reflect upon it. Any conscious registration of the present moment is always too late; the present glides into the past, introspection is always retrospection. In this case, the paradoxical statement, “[t]ime present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past” (BN I) is resolved as well. As future moments come to be and recede into the past, unfulfilled potentials of the past and present may also come to be in the future. In other words, past and future are suspended in a reciprocal relationship where they exert an equal and opposite weight on each other. Diachronic temporality, which assumes a unidirectional conception of time, is simply one out of many variants it could take shape.
The persona literally arrives full circle at the end, and that which previously culminates in a sense of jaded resignation, “[r]idiculous the sad waste of time / Stretching before and after” (BN I) is now replaced with a renewed enthusiasm for future adventures, as indicated in the lines below.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (LG V)
While the place of origin is easily understood as the place where the poet-to-be first “started,” that is, at the beginning of the Künstlerroman, it could also be a reference to the starting point of his literary ancestors, especially since the first-person singular, “I,” in “Burnt Norton” has been substituted by the first-person plural, “we,” in “Little Gidding.” The artist-to-be, who comes to realise that artistic production is not a solitary process as it demands the combined knowledge and efforts of the individual and his literary predecessors, evolves into a full-fledged poet in this instance.
If Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s claim that “[o]ne of the functions or effects of poetic form is to ‘frame’ the poetic utterance: to maintain its identity as distinct from that of ordinary discourse, to draw an enclosing line, in other words, that marks the boundary between ‘art’ and ‘reality’” (402) is to be applied here, Hill’s Mercian Hymns stands as an obvious counterfactual example. Despite, or perhaps because of its—deceptively—simplistic syntax, its poetic form proves to be a baffling issue. Other than the fact that it bears more resemblance to spoken speech, and therefore, blurs the “boundary between ‘art’ and ‘reality’” (Smith 402), when considered in terms of auditory quality and syntactical arrangement alone, it is likely that Mercian Hymns, which is palpably absent of full rhymes, would be categorised as prose. However, because it takes the form of “short paragraphs justified at both margins, with the first line of each ‘outdented’, slightly overhanging the left margin” (Day 15), a curious visual configuration that breaches standard prose formatting and hints at a degree of poetic latitude, we are forced to revise our previous conjecture, and conclude that it is perhaps a series of prose poems. However, both accounts are wrong, because according to the author, Mercian Hymns is “versets of rhythmic prose” (Hill qtd. in Day).
Nevertheless, any attempt to differentiate the two would end in aporia. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, prose poem is defined as “a prose work having the style, character, or diction of a poem,” while “versets of rhythmic prose” already embody both prose and poetic qualities. Perhaps then, the true identity of Mercian Hymns does not matter; instead, what is noteworthy is Hill’s employment of an unusual poetic form that permits its verses to resemble verbal discourse in common reality. In doing so, the readers are lulled by this false sense of familiarity and security, before the enigmatic climate of the series forces them to become more discerning, as well as to re-evaluate common assumptions. The substantial use of anachronisms—after all, artefacts such as “prize pens” (X) do not exist in medieval England—in Offa’s narrative for instance, reminds readers that while the protagonist of a particular verset appears to be Offa, the tale could also be a reference to Hill. Despite the centuries between them, Hill and Offa could sometimes be conflated with each other, which then affirms the idea that some universal human experiences could transcend the temporal axis, and extend to persons across all time.
At the fundamental level, two veins of narratives are presented in Mercian Hymns. Other than serving as a Bildungsroman for King Offa, it also doubles as a Künstlerroman for the unnamed poet figure, whose narrative occupies approximately half of the poetic series. In this case, although the title, “Mercian Hymns,” appears to privilege the protagonist of the medieval narrative, because the biography of the contemporary poet—who is often assumed to be Hill himself—occupies approximately half of the poetic series, it would seem that both speakers are given equal weightage. However, Offa’s narrative is in fact, secondary to the autobiography of the poet, for it is only a mechanism by which the Künstlerroman is illuminated and achieved. At first glance, the Bildungsroman seems to be an incongruent label for Mercian Hymns. The non-chronological structure of the versets renders it such that the childhood, adolescence and adulthood of the Mercian ruler are jumbled up, which then elides, or at least, skims over the moment where we see Offa’s advancement towards the desired state of maturity and “self-possession” (XIII), which constitutes both the apotheosis and telos of the Bildungsroman.
However, it is precisely because Offa’s narrative is presented as a disordered Bildungsroman that the prowess of the beginner artist, who is the in the midst of discovering his own artistic voice and identity, could be demonstrated. By labelling the hymns numerically, he effectively establishes a sequential, and therefore, chronological arrangement that paradoxically privileges temporal entropy—because episodes from both Hill and Offa’s narratives are often randomly presented—as paradigm. Nevertheless, an inherent order remains at the heart of Mercian Hymns because the cogency of the narrative, at least on the level of the descriptive titles, remains relatively undiminished. Beginning from “The Naming of Offa” and ending with “The Death of Offa,” Hill constructs the perception that one may obtain holistic biographical insight on the Mercian monarch, but of course, this is not the case. Only snippets of Offa’s life are presented, and even then, Hill’s deliberate use of ambiguity renders it difficult for one to differentiate between the many poetic voices—is it Offa or Hill that is speaking?—that saturate this (auto)biographical account.
Returning to the subject of poetic form, it is obvious that only Hymn XXX, with its peculiar spacing midway through the first paragraph, between “to- / wards us” and “he vanished” could lay claim to being, or at least, resembling a poem. If anything, the lines below, where coherent prose—from previous versets—has given way to enigmatic prose, exemplify Smith’s aforementioned comment on the effects of “poetic utterance[s]” (402).
And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-
wards us he vanished
he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of
red mud. (XXX)
The clause, “he vanished,” not only reaffirms the death of Offa, it also performs the blank that precedes it, thereby accentuating the increasing finesse and maturation of the novice poet. While the contents of the verset remain relatively straightforward, the latitude in formatting, as represented by the sudden gap in the first line—or stanza—shows that the novice artist has reached the final stage of the Künstlerroman, and is in the midst of developing his own poetic voice and style. At the elementary level, if Mercian Hymns primarily functions as a journey for the poet to discover his artistic self, then Offa’s death, as a means of eliminating the superfluous presence from the poet’s narrative, proves inevitable as well.
On another note, the first twenty nine versets of Mercian Hymns could in fact be seen as a journey of self-exploration for the budding poet, who evolves from writing “versets of rhythmic prose” (Hill qtd. in Day 15), an ambivalent poetic form heavily infused with prose qualities, to actual poetry. Hymn XXX not only thus marks a turning point for the artist, it also inaugurates his exploration into other literary forms. While still largely conforming to the original “kempt and jutting” (XIII) structure of its predecessors, Hymn XXX denotes a slight but significant change that hints at a departure from past norms, an act of experimentation on the part of the artist that is deeply reminiscent of Eliot’s stance, which argues
for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (“Tradition” 37)
From here, it becomes evident that the textual death of Offa is necessary to enact the symbolic birth of the artist, the latter of which finally eligible to progress into the poetic dimension upon attaining the above insight. In this case, the sense of abruptness and incompleteness one experiences at the end of Offa’s narrative could not be simply attributed to the lack of imagination or information on the part of the poet; the sudden blank which emerges midway through the line—or stanza—is not indicative of an epistemological lapse. In fact, it is precisely because the artist no longer requires the king’s narrative as a crutch for self-exploration that the poem could no longer, or rather, has no further need to continue.
Upon closer examination of the titles, we see that Offa’s death, which inaugurates the novice’s emergence from his chrysalis of artistic inadequacy, has actually been initiated since Hymn XXVII. In fact, Hymn XXVII is the only segment which makes his death explicit, and we catch a glimpse of modern people commemorating the legacy of the Mercian monarch, albeit only “perfunctor[ily]” (XXVII). Rather than anachronism, however, this segment appears more like a flash-forward to the future, where Offa’s death is already an unchangeable, historical fact. If the abundant interspersion of anachronisms remains insufficient for the readers to revise their preconception of time as fashioned in Mercian Hymns, the placement of a historical event from the future as the first in the quartet where this occasion has yet to pass, as a method of pre-empting the evolution of the poet-to-be as an imminent possibility, would certainly do so.
Moreover, despite bearing the title of “The Death of Offa,” Hymn XXVIII talks about dynastic continuation and proliferation, which then gestures towards the idea that “Our children and / our children’s children” (XXVIII) exist as palimpsestic beings who bear the imprints of their ancestors. The fact that Hill and Offa are sometimes portrayed to be indistinguishable is not only to highlight the far-reaching influences of the past, but also that time does not, or rather, ought not, determine the relevance of an entity, event or knowledge. For Hill, humanity is the overarching bond that connects persons of different generations together, and this relation is that which is exempt, or at the minimum, resistant to the effects of temporal erosions. Ultimately, the perception of diachronic time lacks the capacity to diminish the similitude between persons, especially those who share a common locale, because this conception of the timeline is only one out of many. The narrative of the relatively unknown medieval king is therefore not diminished in relevance by the mere fact that Offa existed centuries before Hill, instead, the poet is able to gain new insights to his artistic self precisely because the—imagined—past continues to have much bearing on the present. The pair could not be more different, but even then, an incontrovertible connection ties the tyrant who plays with the “sword” (XVI) with the poet who “toys” (VI) with “words.” Just as “words” exist as an anagram of “sword,” perhaps multiple meanings and perspectives could be elucidated when the linearity of time is challenged, and its inner workings are muddled up. In this case, past events could be placed alongside future events, and the soundness of the modernists’ argument would finally be appreciated as well.
The condition of the ideal poet, as conceptualised by the modernists, is an achievable state of affairs. Despite the implicit vein of didacticism in Four Quartets and Mercian Hymns, the absence of prescriptive instructions makes it clear that the individual is free to pursue his artistic voice in his own idiosyncrasies, as long as he abides by the general rules of creating and perpetuating art, especially since any effort to deviate from the method foregrounded in “Tradition” is necessarily an irrational, unfeasible act. By virtue of his vocation, the poet, whose “present moment is enriched by all the past simultaneously” (Lloyd 409), has the capacity to surpass the metronomic drone of quotidian life. Just as the past continues to envelop him, his voice would likewise become a benediction to future generations of poets that directs and guides them into their own Künstlerroman.
———
List of Abbreviations
BN “Burnt Norton”
EC “East Coker”
DS “The Dry Salvages”
LG “Little Gidding”
Works Cited
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