Eliot & The Catalyst

I wanted to sort of flesh out Eliot’s analogy of the catalyst because I find myself questioning Formalism in general based on a poet writing from their own context and their own experience, and, before I get into my questions, I’m going to map out what Eliot is saying with his catalyst idea.

Eliot believes that the poet’s mind is a catalyst (NA 1095); the poet fills his mind with both tradition and experience, and then, as Dr. Powers explained to us in class, the mind works as a catalyst to bring these two things into relationship with one another, thus creating something different from both tradition and experience: the poem.

So the poem is the end result, and I understand that it is something different and separate from both tradition and experience, but this is where I begin to question the Formalist argument because tradition and experience still had to be used to create the poem; they were still very necessary elements to get to the end result of the poem.

I think that Eliot would agree that tradition and experience are important elements to create the poem, but he goes on to argue that the whole point of a poet writing a poem is that they have “a particular medium” to express, and not a “personality” (NA 1096).

But why would a poet want only to express this medium, and not write to express their emotion, or their feelings, or their experience? Eliot says that a poet does make use of “impressions and experiences” (NA 1096), so much that they are able to combine them to create and give the reader “a new art emotion” (NA 1097). He argues that the poet uses what they know and what they feel to evoke a brand new emotion for the reader to feel.

So I completely understand the logic of Eliot’s argument here with the catalyst, and even though he would agree that tradition and experience are important in the making of the poem, he argues that when the poem is being read, the reader cannot connect with the author. I simply just don’t understand this. Am I missing something?? How can the reader not be allowed to connect with the author when the poem they are reading indirectly resulted from the poet’s very own experiences?