Yes, more Eliot...

I, too, find myself drawn to Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Although the poet took centre stage, I couldn’t help think about the critic. Where does the critic fit here? (And, yes, I am extrapolating here and being a “bad” critic in my response.) The whole idea of “creation” and its connection to the critic has always interested me. How often are you asked when describing your prospective career, do you write? It makes sense that studying English would mean that we too “write,” right? By this it is usually implied, do we write fiction? I have found myself attempting to justify critical writing on many occasions and usually I feel inadequate and incomplete in my explanation of my “talents.” Perhaps it is my own anxiety about the perceived value of the critic vs. the poet, fiction writer, dramatist, or whatever. Instead of Woody Allen’s dictum, “those who can do teach, and those who can’t teach, teach PE,” I wonder if those who can’t write, write criticism. I’m being hyperbolic, of course, but after reading Eliot, I kept asking myself if the critic is a role designed to those who can’t truly be artists.

In the case of Eliot, he consistently refers to the poet as the example of tradition. “The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.” The critic must also follow a similar model and in this way I think the critic does indeed have as much creative license, social agency, and talent as an artist. Eliot then goes on to say, “he must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.” And isn’t this the critic’s role? In this sequence of art, tradition, and creation, the critic pushes ideas forward, challenges tradition in order to create new discussion threads, and promotes art forms, such as poetry. Eliot wears both hats in this capacity, but what about the art form as criticism? Although this post might seem a bit incoherent, my main anxiety is that the critic is not considered an artist, is consistently challenged in mass culture as elitist and without any productive ideas, and, finally, has no real “use-value” in society. Certainly these are amplified anxieties, but am I the only one who questions our paths into criticism? After all, we are not reading about pedagogy here, so how do we view ourselves in contemporary academia as opposed to the “traditional” sphere?