Testimony before Trauma: Eliot’s Poetry up to 1915

Abstract

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot wrote that “anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year” requires “the historical sense”. His precise choice of age has encouraged contextualisation of this statement in his own biography, in which case he would have been twenty-five in September 1913, two years after his early flowering of poetry. Yet while Eliot’s “historical sense” in 1919 was of “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer … has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (SE, 14), his sense of history from sailing to Europe in July 1914, weeks before war was declared, was of an indeterminate menace. His poetry in the first year of war strained to find meaning between private and historical experience, although he managed to compose the first fragments of what would become The Waste Land, the testament of his “historical sense”.