Another Voice: T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," and the Changing Nature of Tradition

Literary Criticism


“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.”

-Eliot, “Little Gidding” (lines 118-119)

Michael Levenson, in his essay, “The End of Tradition and the Beginning of History,” argues that, in the time period between writing “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and writing Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot changes his opinion on the nature of time. Eliot moves, according to Levenson, from “a spatial understanding which sees all historical time as extended before the discerning eye” to “a temporal understanding which surrenders the hope of possessing an ever-receding past” (167). However, in distinguishing between Eliot’s “rival understandings of history” (167), Levenson ignores the timelessness of “Little Gidding.” The last Quartet, and Eliot’s final major poem, “Little Gidding” represents Eliot’s return to an understanding of tradition consistent with that expressed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot manifests this return most clearly in the Dantesque passage of the second part.

To understand the significance of this consistency, it is first of all important to understand how Levenson’s assertion is correct. Most of Levenson’s assertions about Eliot’s early understanding of time are self-evident in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot envisions the European tradition as a single force which gives meaning to literary history through a “simultaneous existence” with the present (2171). This simultaneous existence can be understood in the context of Eliot’s criticism of Ben Johnson: “we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary” (Eliot Selected Essays 148). The contemporaniety of the past in Eliot’s understanding of tradition leads Levenson to the analogy of a “trailer park of literary greatness—where all the dead poets congregate and arrange themselves into a systematic whole” (163). What Eliot seeks after here is timelessness—tradition that “abandons nothing” (Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 2172) and thus allows the poet immortality in the “mind of Europe.”

Several difficulties prevent Eliot from retaining this perspective, all of which may be summarized in what Levenson labels as “the failure of the ideal of simultaneity” (172). Eliot’s own poetry offers the first hint of this failure. “That a month after finishing The Waste Land,” observes Levenson, “Eliot would call it ‘a thing of the past as far as I am concerned’, and that he could disavow critical principles as soon as they had been embraced give clear signs of modernism’s own temporality” (169). Eliot, himself, admits that “I may often repeat what I have said before, and I may often contradict myself” (Eliot On Poetry and Poets 26). What Eliot wrote in practice defied his critical assertion of a timeless tradition. Of the period shortly before “Little Gidding,” which included the writing of the other three Quartets, Levenson remarks, “Gone is the contention that the mind of Europe abandons nothing . . . gone is the easy confidence that we can see the dead poets as our contemporaries, ‘unbiased by time’” (Levenson 174). Eliot goes so far as to claim in “Burnt Norton,” that “if all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable” (4-5). In other words, Eliot’s perspective has changed, in that he no longer feels that an “eternally present” concept of tradition can redeem the obvious temporality of history.

Threatening the demise of England and therefore the death of the English literary tradition, World War II quickened Eliot’s concern about the temporality of time. Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Eliot, notes a quote from the English periodical Mass Observation, reading, "One vital effect of the air-raids is the blurring of the future.” Ackroyd continues, “There is a tendency for people's whole outlook to be foreshortened, so that life exists from day to day – and Eliot was by no means immune to such general fears" (263). The uncertainty of the future led Eliot, in a letter to Virginia Woolf, to “speculate about a future race which might come across the name T. S. Eliot and wonder who he was” (254). Underlying this remark is the thought that, if England were to find itself at “the world’s end” (as Eliot refers to it in line 36 of “Little Gidding”), how could Eliot find permanence in its dead tradition?

Eliot’s concern over the death of tradition was by no means limited to his own position in that tradition. The critic Alan Marshall claims that Eliot’s concern over the lack of a “public language” or “common values,” as would be defined in a timeless tradition, was a primary motivation behind Eliot’s writing of the Four Quartets (95). The Four Quartets can be understood largely as an attempt to discover a way for tradition to survive temporality. Ackroyd suggests that this was exactly the effect of “East Coker,” which “afforded consolation” by celebrating English history, “a tradition which would survive the betrayals of the contemporary generation” (Ackroyd 255). Eliot’s desire to keep the idea of tradition alive in spite of temporality is a point that Levenson largely ignores.

None of the first three Quartets offer a solution. “Little Gidding,” however, makes a solution possible by once again reevaluating the method by which one can be redeemed from time. In part five, Eliot claims “A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / of timeless moments” (235). This statement virtually reverses the qualification in “Burnt Norton” that one cannot be redeemed from an “eternally present” time. Eliot has finally developed a solution that allows the timelessness of tradition to once again become the redeeming aspect of history. To understand this solution, one needs only to look at the predominance of the philosophy of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in the second part of “Little Gidding.”

The “moment” of the second part retains the timelessness of the first part’s “intersection of the timeless moment” (52). Ironically, it is the temporality of war, specifically the aftermath of the Blitz, that creates this “uncertain hour before the morning” (78), with “no before and no after” (105-106). Ackroyd comments on the ability of war to achieve this effect by catching Eliot “in a middle period when pre-war life seemed unreal and post-war life unimaginable” (264). The total interruption of historical continuity, instead of threatening tradition, freezes time in a “middle period” and creates the passage through which “two worlds become much like each other” (Eliot “Little Gidding” 122). The war-torn world of T. S. Eliot becomes one in a timeless union with the world of his poetic ancestry. George S. Jay is one of many critics who acknowledge that “this violation of temporal rules recalls the simultaneous order of literature in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’” (232).

The terza rima form offers an immediate connection to tradition. The passage instantly recalls Dante’s encounter with Brunetto Lattini in his Inferno. Through Eliot’s deliberate allusion, the reader can easily see how “the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 2171). Just as the context of the Inferno directs the purgatorial elements of Eliot’s passage, the context of Eliot’s walk through “the uncertain hour” provokes the reader to reevaluate the meaning of Dante’s encounter. As Jay observes, “the approach to its meaning will in this other time alter Dante” (232). By these means, tradition “abandons nothing” yet adjusts itself to accommodate the present. The present and the past therefore simultaneously compose this poem. More importantly to Eliot’s concept of tradition, the poem’s reliance on Dante allows it to “assert [Dante’s] immortality most vigorously” (Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 2171), even while surrounded by the threat of temporality.

Dante is not the only poet to speak through the poem. Yeats, Swift, and Shakespeare (through the parting allusion to “Hamlet”) each, in turn, contribute to the poetry of this section. But even more striking is the embodiment of these poets in the “familiar compound ghost” (95). The ambiguity of Eliot’s reference to the ghost as “some dead master” (92) suggests that the ghost consists of more than just Yeats and Swift. Ackroyd makes reference to the "unity" Eliot saw in the "English letters of the past," which merged into "a recognizable entity called European literature." He suggests that Eliot presents this "entity" through the compound ghost (271). Eliot’s encounter, then, becomes more than a simple discourse with childhood heroes. He is starting a dialogue with the mind of Europe.

Several lines of the poem hint that he means to put himself in this mind. He assumes a “double part” (96) being both himself and “someone other” (100) at the same time. The face of the ghost is “still forming” (101), supporting the idea that tradition is constantly forming; and, more significantly, that the reason it is still forming is that Eliot is a part of it’s simultaneous shaping. Finally, as mentioned before, the world of Eliot has become like the world of the ghost, effectively blurring the boundaries between Eliot and the mind of Europe.

By embodying the mind of Europe in the compound ghost, Eliot again supports the argument of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that tradition speaks through the present. Jay argues that the reliance is mutual: “The ghost depends on the present and the poet for life and authority, and vice versa.” (240). By placing himself within this ghost, Eliot displays the mutual nature of tradition. As seen in the last few pages of the essay, repetition and imitation of past poets is an important factor of the Dante section. Rather than making the poem trite, though, it reveals the contemporaniety of the past. Says Jay: “Repetition is not death, not the sign of exhausted sensibility or the horror of meaningless recurrence. It is the shared project of the poets” (238). A few pages later he observes that the “imitation of Dante and Yeats . . . manage[s] to bring ‘last year’s words’ to life again in ‘another voice’” (240). This merger of the past with the future—this simultaneous project of the poets united in a timeless moment—directly combats the temporality that Eliot had worried might render tradition meaningless.

The end result, of course, cannot destroy the reality of temporality. It instead uses it to give birth to a new redemptive quality of time that relies on the ‘now.’ The reader will notice that none of the allusions of “Little Gidding” survive in any sense of historical continuity—even the Dante section “faded on the blowing of the horn” (149). Eliot has given up trying to find a way for tradition to survive in historical time. Instead, he develops a perspective that he had hinted at in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” wherein he defines the historical sense as being of the “timeless and of the temporal together” (2171). Temporal time gives meaning to the timeless by reminding the poet of the true nature of tradition. Tradition is timeless, but only in the context of the immediate presence.

Eliot’s concluding rallying cry, that “History is now and England” (237), places an emphatic exclamation mark on the significance of tradition as an eternal present. It is this history, existing only in the now, that can redeem the discontinuity of historical time. For Eliot, redemption does not mean that the future will keep his tradition alive. Instead, the very existence of tradition in the now is enough to overcome temporality. He has found immortality not in living forever, but by living in a moment that transcends time. Whether or not tradition is remembered, Eliot can honestly echo the voice of his ghost, “these things”—the tradition—“have served their purpose” (113).

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.

Eliot, T. S. “Burnt Norton.” The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber, 1969.

Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber, 1969.

Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1965.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. 6th ed. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.

Jay, Gregory S. T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983.

Levenson, Michael. “The End of Tradition and the Beginning of History.” Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” Ed. Edward Lobb. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993.

Marshall, Alan. "England and Nowhere." The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Posted December 15, 1999 (03:59 PM)