The Egoist, War, Hell and Image

Abstract

This chapter seeks to explore the contents of two issues of the little magazine The Egoist, which constitute the first published context of Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. The editorial powers and philosophies of Harriet Shaw Weaver, Dora Marsden and Eliot are discussed, along with contributions by the poet Evelyn Scott, and avant-garde theatre critic Huntly Carter. Considerable attention is given to the poet and publisher John Rodker, who gives an interesting review of a number of volumes of poetry published by Blackwell. Rodker’s column is analysed with close reference to a number of the individual poems and volumes he reviews. This allows us to gauge the impact of Eliotic and Poundian poetics on some of the minor poets of the era; to test Eliot’s thesis on tradition and individual talents on his contemporaries. Rodker’s review of Aldous Huxley is discussed in some detail, and includes comparisons with the work of Pound, Eliot, Woolf and Yeats. His review of poems by Edith Sitwell, and Osbert Sitwell, receives similar treatment. There follows an excursus into Rodker’s own poetry, comparing it with the poetry of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and the war poet Isaac Rosenberg, and also touching on Harlem poetics. Rodker’s treatment of contemporary themes of memorialising the war dead, returns us to the concerns of Eliot’s essay.