Tradition and the Individual Talent

Eliot’s analogy of the chemical reaction links platinum, sulphur dioxide, and oxygen to specific parts of the poetic process. But even before he introduces the analogy, the language of chemical reaction and scientific reason shapes Eliot’s images. When speaking of criticism, Eliot uses the phrase “test” to describe the process of evaluation and “application” to reference the performance of this method. The language of science deepens with his insistence on knowledge of the past and present. The knowledge of tradition represents the evidence of his method, the collection and understanding of what has come before to create a new work.

To introduce the chemical reaction analogy at the end of Part 1, Eliot states, “It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science” (39). The language of the catalyst continues to charge the relationship between the poet and the poem. Emotions and feelings become “elements” and “particles” that fuse and unite to form a new “combination.” Toward the end of the essay, Elliot critiques Wordsworth’s definition of poetry—“an emotion recollected in tranquility”—as “an inexact formula” for the creation of a poem (42). The use of scientific language aligns the life of the mind, something unseen, with a process more visible and tangible for the reader and communicates ethereal concepts through the lens of Modernist innovation.