T. S.

Eliot
(1888—1965)

DR. KALYANI VALLATH

TS Eliot • Towering gure of the 20th century
• Poet, playwright, journalist & critic
• In criticism, he speaks with authority &
conviction
• Prose style—precise & memorable
• Largely responsible for the revival of interest
in the Metaphysical poets
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Works
• Critical works—2 types
Theoretical
Criticism
• Theoretical criticism—essays dealing with nature &
function of criticism, poetry & drama. E.g. Function of
Criticism

Practical
Criticism
• Practical Criticism—essays dealing with a number of
authors & their works. E.g. The English Metaphysical Poets
Works
• Popular essays in literary criticism
• Tradition and the Individual Talent
• Poetry and Drama
• Function of Criticism
• The English Metaphysical Poets
• The Frontiers of Criticism
The Metaphysical Poets
• Metaphysical poets possessed uni cation of sensibility. Later poets like Milton,
Dryden, Tennyson, etc. lack it.
• In the 17th century, a dissociation of sensibility set in from which English poetry has
never recovered.

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Hamlet and His Problems
• An essay written in 1919
• The essay rst appeared in Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
in 1920
• Finest example for destructive or iconoclastic criticism
• Hamlet lacks ‘Objective Correlative’ because he is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible
• Regards Hamlet as an artistic failure
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18th century poetry
• Cursed with a pastoral convention and a ruminative mind.
• In this age, Johnson is the most alien gure. He was a student of mankind & no way
an imitator of Dryden or Pope.
• Johnson has ‘the proper wit of poetry’.
• Eliot’s remarks on Dryden & Johnson reveal his penetrating intellect & higher power of
analysis.
• Did not agree with Arnold as critic. Regarded Arnold’s criticism as too dry, abstract,
intellectual, & devoid of emotion. But admired Arnold, the poet.
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 Tradition and the Individual Talent
• First published in 1919 in The Egoist
• In uenced by Bergson and Babbitt
• Uno cial manifesto of Eliot’s critical creed
• Three parts
• I—Conception of tradition
• Undue stress of individuality shows that the English have an uncritical turn of
mind
• In the best & most individual part of the modern poets, the dead poets assert
their immortality
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Tradition and the Individual Talent
• Tradition implies
• Recognition of the continuity of literature.
• A critical judgement as to which of the writers of the past continue to be signi cant
in the present.
• Knowledge of these signi cant writers obtained through painstaking e ort.
• Dynamic conception of tradition
• Just as the past directs & guides the present, so the present alters & modi es the
past.
• To know the tradition the poet must judge critically what are the main trends & what
are not.
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Tradition and the Individual Talent
• II—Impersonality of Poetry
• Personality of the poet is not important, the important thing is his sense of tradition.
• Honest criticism & sensitive appreciation is not directed upon the poet but upon the
poetry.
• Compares the mind of a poet to a catalyst; the process of poetic creation, a chemical
reaction.
• Gives the example of Oxygen and Sulphur Dioxide producing Sulphurous Acid in
the presence of the Filament of Platinum
• Compares poet’s mind to a jar or receptacle in which numberless feelings & emotions,
etc. are stored. Thus poetry is organisation rather than inspiration.
Tradition and the Individual Talent
• Greatness of the poem lies in the intensity of the process of poetic composition.
• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality but an escape from it.
• III part—Concludes the discussion
Joyce endorses!
• The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, re ned out of existence, indi erent, paring his ngernails.

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Quotations from Tradition and the Individual Talent

• We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's di erence from his predecessors,
especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to nd something that can be
isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice
we shall often nd that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may
be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most
vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the
period of full maturity.
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Quotations from Tradition and the Individual Talent

• The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of
its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own
generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe
from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense,
which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of
the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time
what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity.
Quotations from Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much
more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.
• It is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the
intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion
takes place, that counts.
Quotations from Tradition and the Individual Talent

• 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." Poetry is
not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have
personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
The Function of Criticism (1923)
• Reply to the romantic critic Middleton Murray’s critique on Eliot’s Romanticism and the
Tradition.
• Continues his argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
• Criticism is not an autotelic activity.
• End of criticism—elucidation of works of art & the correction of taste.
Qualifications of an Ideal Critic
• Must be entirely impersonal & objective. Considers Aristotle as a perfect critic.
• Must not be emotional.
• Must have a highly developed sense of fact—knowledge of technical details of a poem.
• Must have developed sense of tradition.
• The critic & the creative artist must be the same person.
• Must have a thorough understanding of the language & structure of the poem.
• Must be an expert in the use of tools—comparison & analysis.
• Must not try to judge the present by the standards of the past. He must be liberal in his
outlook & must be prepared to correct & revise his views from time to time, in the light
of new facts.
Function of a Critic
• To elucidate works of art.
• Correct taste & educate the taste of the people.
• Common pursuit of true judgement
• Promote the enjoyment & understanding of works of art.
• By placing before the readers the relevant facts about the poem, the critic emphasizes its impersonal
nature, & thus promotes correct understanding.
• Critic shifts, combines, connects, expunges & thus imparts perfection & nish to what has been
created
• A critic must nd common principles for the pursuit of criticism
• A critic is not to pass judgement or determine good or bad. His function is to place the similar kinds
of facts before the readers & thus help them to form their own judgement
• Eliot’s conception of a critic & his functions is classical
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Eliot’s Critical method
• His style is neutral; works through negatives & is devoid of emotional phrase &
metaphors & underneath it runs a delightful current of humour & irony
• Uses thought-provoking quotations
• Exact & precise
• Irony & devastating wit are potent instruments in the hands of Eliot
• Leaves the readers to form their judgements
• Comparison is an important aspect of Eliot’s critical method
• Avoids all digressions, biographical, historical or sociological
 Important Concepts: Objective correlative
• Term rst used by American painter Washington Allston in 1840
• A set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula for the
poet’s emotion so that, “when the external facts are given the emotion is at once
evoked.
• Hamlet—an artistic failure.
• For Cleanth Brooks Objective Correlative means “Organic Metaphor”.
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 Dissociation of Sensibility, Unification of Sensibility

• Used in Metaphysical Poets.

• Fusion of thought & feeling.
• A re-creation of thought into feeling.
• A direct sensuous apprehension of thought.
• Bad poetry results when there is “dissociation of sensibility” i.e. poet is unable to feel his
thoughts.
• Eliot nds such Uni cation of Sensibility in the Metaphysical poets & regrets that in the
late 17th century a Dissociation of Sensibility set in.
• In uence of Milton & Dryden has been harmful.
• Uni cation of Sensibility—harmonious working of the creative & critical faculties of a poet.
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 Dissociation of Sensibility, Unification of Sensibility

• We may express the di erence by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth
century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of
sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, arti cial,
di cult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido
Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility
set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was
aggravated by the in uence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and
Dryden.
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 Dissociation of Sensibility, Unification of Sensibility

• Dissociation of sensibility is the reason for the “di erence between the intellectual and
the re ective poet.”
• The intellectual poet “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any
kind of experience.”
• When the dissociation of sensibility occurred, “the poets revolted against the
ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by ts, unbalanced; they re ected.”
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 Example from Donne
• Our two souls, therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat
(Valediction)
• If they be two, they are two so
As sti twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the xed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if the other do.
(Valediction)
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Examples from Donne
• The intellectual conceits are not in disharmony with the feeling in the poem
• They actually add weight and illustrate a feeling
What is a Classic
Eliot: Theory & Practice
• Eliot’s theories about modernist poetry are enacted in his work:
• his writing seeks to shock the reader out of complacency
• We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death. (The Journey of the Magi)
• Eliot attempts to nd a solution for disorderliness:
• By bringing broken, disparate elements into a sort of conceptual unity.
• “The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless
feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can
unite to form a new compound are present together”
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