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Name: Maru Janak J

Roll no: 22

Paper: (7) Literary Theory & Criticism

Topic: T.S. Eliot Tradition and Individual Talent

Email: marujank17@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English M.K.B.U Bhavnagar University

  

v T.S. Eliot Tradition and Individual Talent

·                  INTRODUCTION:

               T.s Eliot was most towering and dominating man of letters of the 20th century. He was a versatile genius who during his long span of productive activity achieved distinction as a poet, play wright, journalist and critic. Eliot stands in long line of poet crities beginning with Johnson and including such names as Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge and Mathew Arnold such critics know the mysteries of their own art and so can speack with force and conviction. Eliot’s critical pronouncements first published largely in the form of articles and essays in numberous peridicals and journals of the day.

·                Tradition and Individual Talent:

      Critical commentary manifesto of Eliot’s critical creed.

            The essay “tradition and individual talent” was first published in 1919 in the times literary supplement, as a critical article. The essay may be regarded as an unofficial manifesto of Eliot’s critical creed, for it contains all those critical principles from which his criticism has been derived ever since. The seed which have been sown here come to fruition in his subsequent essays. It is a declaration of Eliot’s critical creed and these principles are the basis of all his subsequent criticism.

v    The Essay is Divided into Three Parts:

     The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the part, but also of its presence. One who has the historic sense feels that the whole of the literature of Europe from roman down to his own day, including the literature of his own century, forms one continuous literary tradition.

         He realizes the past exists in present, and the past and present form one simultaneous order. This historical sense is the sense of timeless and the temporal, as well as of the timeless and the temporal together. It is this historic sense which makes a writer traditional. A writer with the sense of tradition is fully conscious of his own generation, of his place in the present, but he is also acutely conscious of his relationship with the writer of the past.

v   Its function:

 The work of a poet in the present is to be compared and contrasted with works of the past, and judged by the standards of the past. But this judgment does not mean determining good or bad it does not mean deciding whether the present work is better or worse than works of the past an author in the present is certainly only to be judged by the principles and standard of the past the comparison is to be made for knowing the facts, all the facts, about the new work of art. The comparison is made for the purposes of analysis, and for forming a better understanding of the new.

         The past helps us to understand the present, and he throws light on the past. It is this way along that we can form an idea of what is really individual and new. It is by comparison along that we can sift the traditional from individual elements in a given work of art.

v   T.S. Eliot’s theory of depersonalization:

        In the second part of the essay Eliot develops future his theory of the impersonality of poetry. He compares this mind of the poet to a catalyst and the process of a chemical reaction, must as chemical reactions take place in the presence of a catalyst along, so also the poet’s mind is the catalytic agent for combining different emotions into something new suppose there is a jar containing oxygen and Sulphur dioxide. These two gases combine to form sulphuric acid when a fine filament of platinum is introduced into the jar. The Combination takes place only in the presence of the place of platinum, but the metal itself does not undergo any change, it remains inserting, natural and un affected. The mind of the poet is like the catalytic agent. It is necessary for combinations of emotions and experiences to take place, but itself does not undergo any change during the process of poetic combination.

          In the case of a young and immature poet, his mind , his personal emotions and experiences, may find some expression in his composition, but ,says Eliot”, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man suffer and the mind which creates”.

          T.s. Eliot here distinguisher between emotions and feeling, but he does not state what this difference is.

              

v    POETRY AS ORGANIZATION:

         Eliot next compares the poet’s mind to a jar or receptacle in which are stored numberless feeling, emotions etc. Which remain there is an organized and chaotic form till

            “All the articles which can unite to form a new compound are present together”.

Thus poetry is organization rather than inspiration impression and experience which are important in for the man way fined no place in his poetry and those which become important in the poetry may have no significance for the man.

          Eliot’s rejects Wordsworth theory of poetry. Having its origin “Emotions recollected in tranquility”. And points out that in the process of poetic composition there is neither emotion, nor recollection for tranquility. In the poetic process there is only concentration of a number of experiences, and anew thing results from concentration. And this process of concentration is neither conscious nor deliberate: it is a passive one.

          The difference between a good and a bad poet is that a bad is conscious and unconscious where he should be conscious. It is this consciousness of the wrong kind which makes a poem personal, whereas mature art must be impersonal, but Eliot does not tell us when a poet should be conscious, and when not. The point has been left vague and interminate.

v  conclusion:   

                                                            

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but as escape from emotion: it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”.

                                              Thus, Eliot does not deny personality or emotion to the poet only, the must depersonalize his emotions. There should be extinction of his personality this impersonality can be achieved only when the poet surrenders himself completely to the work that is to be done and the poet can know what is to be done, only if he acquires a sense of tradition, the historic sense, which makes him conscious, not only of the present, but also of the present movement of the past, not only of what is dead, but of what is already living.

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