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T. S. ELIOT
• T. S. Eliot was a great poet and critic of modern age.
He had declared himself as a classicist in literature,
an Anglo-Catholic in religion and a royalist.
• He wrote in his essay on Matthew Arnold “From time
to time, every hundred years or so, it is desirable that
some critic should appear to review the past of
literature and set the poets and poems in a new
order. This task is but of re-adjustment”.
• Eliot has almost accomplished a revolution in
critical taste. He has compelled us to
reconsider and re-assess the whole critical
theory from Plato to the Victorian Era. His
critical achievements have been tremendous.
Tradition and Individual Talent
• In this essay Eliot discusses some vital problems of
literature in a sustained manner. The idea of tradition
is germane to both literary creation and literary
criticism. He challenges the notion that a poet should
be traced in proportion to his originality.
• Apart from tradition a poet is a mere phantom. He
cannot be understood. He must therefore flow in the
main current of literature.
• “Tradition” does not mean a blind or timid adherence
to the success of a former generation. It involves in
the first place historical sense which we may call
merely indispensible to anyone who would continue
to be a poet beyond his twenty fifth year.
Tradition and Individual Talent
• And the historical sense involves a perception of the
pastiness of the past but of its presence.
• The historical sense compels a man to write with not
merely his own generation in the bones but with the
feeling that the whole literature of Europe from
Homer and within it, the whole literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes
a simultaneous order. It is this historical sense which
makes a writer traditional.
• Eliot is attacking the romantic cut of personality. The
business of a poet is not to find new emotions but to
use ordinary ones and in working them up into poetry
to express feelings which are not in actual emotions
at all.
• And emotions which he has never experienced will
serve the purpose as well as those familiar to him.
• He does not accept Wordsworth’s theory of emotions
recollected in tranquility. There he finds neither
emotions, nor recollection nor tranquility.
• He vehemently attacks the romantic theory of poetry
in these lines
“ poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an
escape from personality. But of course those who
have personality and emotions know what it means to
want to escape from these things. Progress of an
artist is continual self sacrifice, continual extinction of
personality. The poet’s personality is a mere medium,
a catalyst which makes it possible for diverse
emotions and feelings to be fused organically in a
poem.”
• Eliot’s idea of tradition holds good for the literary critic
also. No poet, no artist of any art has his complete
meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relations to the dead poets
and the artists.
• You cannot value him alone, you must set him for
contrast and comparison for criticism.
• This is a principle of aesthetics not merely historic
criticism.
• The necessity that he shall conform that he shall
cohere is not one-sided. What happens when a new
work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded
it.
• The existing monuments form an ideal order among
themselves which is modified by the introduction of
the new work of art among them. The existing order
is complete before the new work arrives. For order to
persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole
existing order must be if ever so slightly altered and
so the relations proportions values of each work of art
towards that whole are readjusted and this is the
conformity between the new and the old.
• In the process there is a clear exposition of the
impersonal theory of poetry which has become so
closely associated with Eliot. In the essay we find the
exposition of certain principles and theories which
never changed radically in the course of time. One
cannot overlook the fact that this essay serves as a
framework to which many of his future critical essays
refer.
• The concept of tradition basic to Eliot’s theory of
poetry demands the surrender of the poet’s
subjectivity to an outside authority. Tradition is that
outside authority to which the writer as well as the
critic have to submit.
• The impersonal theory of poetry has two
aspects: it expresses the relation between the
poet and literary tradition on one hand and on
the other it brings out the relation of the poet
with himself in the creation of a work of art.
• It has been the habit of critics to praise a poet for his
individual features in his poetry. There is importance
given to those features in which a poet least
resembles others. In other words the poet is praised
for being untraditional. This, according to Eliot shows
ignorance of literary heritage. On shedding prejudice
it will be noted that the most original portions of a
poet’s work are those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously.
• Being traditional however does not imply blind
imitation. Tradition is a matter of much wider
significance. It cannot be inherited, one has to work
hard to acquire it. It involves historical sense which is
the sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal
together. This sense of time being eternally present
of the existence of the past and the present together
is what makes a write traditional.
CONCEPT OF GREATNESS OF THE
PAST
• It is necessary to note that the Eliot’s concept of the
importance of past in the idea of literary tradition is
different from Arnold’s idea of greatness of past.
• Arnold considers the works of the past as a standing
reference to which the modern poets should look if
they were to make anything of their poetry.
• The past cannot be seen separately from the present.
It has to be seen in close relationship to the present.
The poet with a sense of tradition will neither reject
the past nor respect or imitate it indiscriminately.
CONCEPT OF GREATNESS OF THE
PAST
• He will assimilate the past so completely that it
becomes a part of himself. When he works, he will
create something in which the past should be
modified by the present and the present will be
directed by the past. An artist has to submit his
subjective self to the awareness of tradition in the
creation of art, it becomes necessary that the artist
makes a continual self-sacrifice, the process of
gaining maturity involves a continual extinction of
personality.
IMPERSONAL THEORY OF ART
• T. S. Eliot believes in the impersonal theory of art.
When he comes to discuss of the relation of the
poem to its author, he insists on separating the man
and the poet experience from art. He says the more
perfect the artist the more completely separate in him
will be the man who suffers and the mind which
creates.
• He regards the poet’s mind as a medium rather than
a personality. He says that the feeling or emotion or
vision resulting from the poem is something different
from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of
the poet.
• A poet is great not because he puts his personality
into his work but because he has a mind in which he
varied feelings enter into new combinations.
• There are two kinds of emotions: one is the emotion
of the poet which is impure and crude and the other
is the emotion of the poem which he calls the
significant emotion. The significant emotion has its
life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The
emotion of art is impersonal.
• It is not the greatness, the intensity of the
emotion, the confidence but the intensity of
the artistic process, the pressure so to speak
under which the fusion takes place that
counts.
• Poetry is a conscious art and requires
constant effort. There is a great deal in the
writing of poetry which must be conscious
and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually
unconscious where he ought to be conscious
and conscious where he ought to be
unconscious. Both errors tend to make him
personal.