Since I am the son of a chemist (my family regularly used beakers as juice glasses, pipettes as straws, mortar and pestle to chop nuts, a graduated cylinder to measure liquids, and a glass retort flask that my mother insisted on keeping in the cabinet above the fridge), I figure I’m a perfect candidate to make sense of T.S. Eliot’s chem-lab analogy from his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Writing about his desired approach to criticism, the world as it influences the poet, as well as poetic lineage, he writes about the “action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide.”
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If only I’d listened to my teacher in fifth period chemistry instead of trying to woo our Swedish exchange student Dagny into being my lab partner.
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I suppose, though, if you’re like me, the analogy is frustrating, baffling. Especially when “filiate” is a word most commonly employed to determine the paternity of a child born out of wedlock. Perhaps, without knowing it, Eliot was not always so sure about his literary parentage. Whether or not, if they somehow appeared, they might lay claim to him, or send him to foster care, an orphanage. The only true orphan I know, my friend Robin, a poet who restores old homes (and thus enamored of tradition), prefers William Carlos Williams to Eliot. This extends to their claimed progeny.
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I suspect Eliot was probably using the term to refer to “filaments” of platinum, because later on in the essay he replaces “filiated” with “filaments.”
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“Filaments,” as in Edison’s unsuccessful attempts to use platinum filaments in his early experiments with light bulbs, ultimately rejected because of the preponderance of gas bubbles produced. So far, already, I’m dealing with three failures: 1) Eliot’s misuse of “filiate” 2) Dagny’s rejecting my tentative (Prufrockian) advances 3) Edison’s first lightbulbs. In any case, only one out of the three turned out to be miraculous.
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Eliot, however, was really thinking about the poet and poetic influence as catalyst. He writes: “When the two [oxygen and sulfur dioxide] gases are mixed in the presence of a filament or platinum, they form sulfurous acid.” Platinum must be present for this to occur. And because it functions as a catalyst, the new solution contains no platinum. “...and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected.
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At this point, though, I think there’s a huge gap in Eliot’s presentation. Elitist as he is, he’s too fixated on the precious platinum, the filaments of which—if I’m following correctly—stand in for the poet’s own mind and sensibility as it grounds itself within the grand tradition and his own poetic influences. The tradition to which he is inextricably and joyously bound.
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But he should not so quickly dismiss the resulting sulfuric acid. One of its main industrial uses (at least when I was growing up in the 1960s) was to remove rust caused by oxidation in the process of making steel. My father, at that time, was the lead scientist at a corporation owned by Sephardic Jews and named for a prominent Quaker family, was always having to visit steel mills in Bethlehem, Detroit and Gary. He had to meet with fellow chemists to advise them on how to use the processes he developed and patented–techniques for lubricating steel parts and greatly reducing the inefficiencies caused by oxidation. One time he returned home after a consulting trip where he received a serious sulfuric acid burn on his forearm. It was painful and eventually became infected, though he rarely complained. But he did warn the family so vociferously about the dangers of acids, over and over again, that I feigned stomach-aches to get out of my high school chem-lab when we were carrying out experiments with any kind of acid, even though we were required to wear masks and gloves and safety goggles, and the mixtures were brewed under exhaust hoods. I can still recall the teacher’s stern warning, that if you so much as drip water into a beaker of sulfuric acid, it would instantly boil and spit in your face, the ultimate bully. The bully of tradition.
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Of course, “acid” in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a whole other story. Tripping and dropping it seems way beyond the scope of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
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But there’s more. Several of my classmates (including one who actually took Dagny to the Homecoming Dance) were from Sicilian families, most of which lived in the town adjacent to my suburban neighborhood. Though there was this one family that lived across the street and everyone up and down the block suspected that the father’s tiny shoe-repair shop was a front for the Mafia. His name meant “cherry” in Italian slang, and we joked about the cherry bombs his son placed beneath cars up and down the block. Many times, my friends and I repeated the tales we heard about how anyone who dared to cross him was killed and dumped into a bathtub full of sulfuric acid, which dissolved his entire body in minutes. That didn’t seem to stop my mother from dropping off shoes to be resoled at the end of the each summer.
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And there’s even more going on here. I imagine that Eliot might have been tinkering with the alchemical term for sulfuric acid, “Vitriol.” Medieval alchemists employed the symbol of the “Green Lion” to represent acids in general, but more specifically, sulfuric acid or vitriol. This symbolic lion was often pictured eating away at substances like rust or waste in order to get to the gold beneath. Alchemists had a saying, “The green lion eats the sun.” They took this to mean the green lion Vitriol was eating away or dissolving our lower selves to reveal something of greater value beneath. Devouring all that was personal, specific, and unique about our lives. All that now has become integral to poetry though perhaps overvalued by contemporary poets. That which is transformed in the course of both chemical reactions and poetry-making. The Green Lion’s lust to rid the world of the personal.
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In Eliot’s analogy, the original platinum remains unaffected by the chemical reaction. It is still inert and unchanged, having lost none of its original value. Likewise, the raw materials of the poet’s life, his suffering, his deep emotions, his passions, his experiences, are always changing and transforming. Separate and not equal, with no intent to integrate. In order to join our forebearers, the poet’s mind must be the catalyst that transmutes and transforms but remains unchanged. At least according to the Eliot of this essay. He’s also superstitiously quick to suggest that these forebearers remain patient and tolerant and long-suffering. In my laboratory, there are no catalysts. Everything changes.
Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex and Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He lives in Blackwood, NJ and teaches at Temple University.