Yeats and T. S. Eliot: Individual Talents, Traditions, and Dialogue with the Dead

Abstract

Based on T. S. Eliot’s cardinal literary essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), this essay examines the two great poetic masters of the twentieth century, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Touching on the poetic traditions of the two masters, this essay shows how much Eliot absorbed Yeats’s poetic tradition into his own poetry through the deep communion with his senior. The poetic tradition of W. B. Yeats is bound up with theosophy, magic, occultism, Irish mythology, Irish legendary heroes at the dawn of history, saints and poets wandering around the island before the coming of Anglo-Saxons. Yeats’s poetic world is fundamentally different from that of Eliot; Yeats’s existential sense of ‛prolonged genocidal humiliation’ is ‛the bitter culmination of seven centuries of British policy in Ireland’ while Eliot’s starting point is with ‘his sense of inner devastation’ against the background of ‘overwhelming desacralization of the Western world.’ Nonetheless, Eliot had learned much from the poetry of Yeats whose poetry is one of ‘refrain, of repetition in a finer tone, raised to the Sublime, to the limits of art.’ Such solemn refrains or incantations raised to the limits of language are also found in Eliot’s major poetic works; The Waste Land, “Ash-Wednesday”, and Four Quartets. On his part, obviously Yeats also learned something from his junior’s critical dictum, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists,” when he defined his theory of supreme art; “Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”