An Objective Chemistry: What T. S. Eliot Borrowed from Schopenhauer

Abstract

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) is T. S. Eliot's expression of his poetics of impersonality, a spirited rejection of romantic subjectivism and emotionalism. But could Eliot's modernist essay be derived in part from what he presents as the unremittingly “emotional” philosophy of Schopenhauer? Section 51 of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation I (1818) presents a metaphor resoundingly familiar to modern readers: the chemistry of verse-writing. A closer examination of “Tradition” and “Hamlet and his Problems” (1919) betrays Schopenhauer's unacknowledged role in Eliot's dictums of impersonal emotion and the “objective correlative.”