Commissioned by the editors of a volume reassessing T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, this paper explores the circumstances in which the essay was written and Eliot’s interaction with Ezra Pound in that period, among others the little-known episode of Eliot’s trip to Les Eyzies in Dordogne, where he discovered the “Magdalenian draughtsman” referred to in the pages of the essay. Eliot’s reading of Wordsworth’s “Preface” is shown to have played a role in the new theory of poetry he proposes. The paper also offers insights into the interrelation between Eliot’s essay and some major poetic works like his “Gerontion” and Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius”, as well as Eliot’s indebtedness to Pound’s critical statements in The Spirit of Romance and elsewhere (the “rose in the steel dust”).
Tradition in 1919: Pound, Eliot, and the ‘historical method’
BACIGALUPO, MASSIMO
2007-01-01
Abstract
Commissioned by the editors of a volume reassessing T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, this paper explores the circumstances in which the essay was written and Eliot’s interaction with Ezra Pound in that period, among others the little-known episode of Eliot’s trip to Les Eyzies in Dordogne, where he discovered the “Magdalenian draughtsman” referred to in the pages of the essay. Eliot’s reading of Wordsworth’s “Preface” is shown to have played a role in the new theory of poetry he proposes. The paper also offers insights into the interrelation between Eliot’s essay and some major poetic works like his “Gerontion” and Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius”, as well as Eliot’s indebtedness to Pound’s critical statements in The Spirit of Romance and elsewhere (the “rose in the steel dust”).
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