Between Eliot and Enlightenment, What Makes a Good Poet?

Originally posted Friday, October 21, by Slick Pine at www.afewlinesmagazine.com

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth after a friend begged me to read it. Since then, I’ve been on a pretty intense consciousness-trip, and I love it. Tolle argues that the egoic mind, the part of you that desperately attempts to give you an identity, is the cause of all of life’s suffering; he hints that we often spend our lives dwelling on emotions that we mistakenly identify ourselves with. In order to move past this barrier, Tolle suggests that we should live in the now and stop thinking about ourselves.

Check out Eckhart Tolle here: http://www.youtube.com/user/EckhartTeachings

I could be projecting, but as I was reading through T.S. Eliot's thoughts on what makes a good poet, I thought it was interesting that he seemed to have reached nearly the same enlightenment as Tolle -- only in a literary sense.

In Tradition and The Individual Talent, Eliot explores the idea of 'traditional' poetry, and comes to the conclusion that poets should stop thinking of themselves and learn more about their traditions -- as he puts it, "...a writer [should be] most acutely conscious of his place in time, [and] of his own contemporaneity" (maybe Eliot is telling poets to do in a literary sense exactly what Tolle is telling the world to do -- live in the now). Eliot seems to think that the tradition is everything; there is no poet in a poem, only the tradition of the poet and of the poets before him. He explains that the tradition is not something that you can learn and copy; it is something that you must add to, and in doing so, change altogether. He says, "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it". He continues to say, "... the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past". It's all pretty metaphysical if you ask me; the 'tradition' exists in timelessness and is never really growing, but is always shifting and changing. In order for a poet to be any good, s/he must be aware of this abstract 'tradition', and as Eliot says, "the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities".

The similarities really hit me when Eliot started criticizing the Romantics for their raw emotion; it seems that Eliot(just like Tolle) wants poets to stop thinking of themselves and their emotions and start thinking about what is in the emotions themselves. He describes William Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry, "emotion recollected in tranquility," as an "inexact formula." he explains that when a poet sits down to write in a quite place, there is no "emotion," or "recollection," or even "tranquility" present -- there are only thoughts jumbling up in a person's head as s/he concentrates to create a new thing from old experiences. Eliot's idea of a good poet is someone who is able to "divert interest from the poet to the poem," and who strives to express "significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet".

Ultimately, it seems that both in writing and in life, you must get rid of your personality to truly find yourself.
My advice: Write away from yourself.

-S.Pine