Critical Analysis of "Tradition and Individual Talent" by Eliot (Part-1)

"Tradition and Individual Talent" is the essay of lasting significance in the history of modern criticism. The essay brought into being two principal aspects of Eliot's critical domain tradition and impersonality in art and poetry, that rated over the realm of criticism. The essay also brings forth Eliot's views on the interrelation between traditional and individual talent. The essay brought into being the new approach with poets of everlasting significance and it also provided the parameters for the assessment of the genius and the shortcomings of the masters but contributed to the history of English Literature. The idea of tradition with all its magnificence, has a meaning beyond the conventional sense of term. It begins with a historical sense and goes on acquiring new dimensions along political and cultural dimension, and this creates a system of axes for the assessment of the worth and genius of a poet. The idea of Eliot's theory of tradition is based on the inevitable phenomenon of the continuity of the values during the process called civilization. Eliot beings with a description that makes tradition a term of abuse and develops to a metaphor of unquestionable authenticity. 'Seldom perhaps', he says, 'does the word appear except in a phrase of censure'. He further says : You can hardly make the word aggreable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology. The above quoted lines from one of the most celebrated critical endeavours make it clear that Eliot aims at developing a new concept and structuring a new approach to the very phenomenon called poetry. Eliot, after beginning with the seemingly derogatory implications of the term imparts a new meaning and magnificence to the term when he identifies tradition with historical sense. The identification discussed above makes it clear that the tradition according to Eliot is something more than mere conglomeration of dead works. The identification of tradition with historical sense serves to ratify the stature of tradition in assessing the works and function of pets and poetry. He elaborates the idea of historical sense and says : and the historical sense invokes a perception not only of the partners of the past but also 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 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.

Eliot in the above quoted line puts forth a dynamic manifestation of tradition which shapes the minds of different poets of different generation. Eliot also inkles that the poet's conformity into tradition is an act of rigorous intellectual efforts that constitute a poet in him. Eliot further defines the idea of historical sense and says : The historical sense which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and of timeless and temporal together, is what makes a writer tradition. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acute by conscious of his place in time of his contemporaneity . The excerpt from the essay makes it clear that Eliot pus the whole term in a much wider context than it is otherwise used before. Eliot takes tradition to be an embodiment of values and beliefs shared by a race which leads to the idea that there is a process of natural selection and rejection. The values and the belief that die with the passage of time are subject to rejection. The values and beliefs that constitute the tradition are living one with capacity of mutual interaction. The old and the new interpenetrate and this interpenetration results into a new order defined in terms of the simultaneous existence of the values of the past and the present. The survival of past ratifies the presentness of it. The simultaneous existence of the past and the present, of the old and the new. It is, thus, evident that the poet is guided chiefly by the dynamics of the tradition. Eliot further elaborates: No poet, no artist has a complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation in the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone, you must set him from contrast and comparison among the dead. Eliot reaffirms that the poet, in order to survive as a poet must invite close contrast and comparison with the dead poets. Unless, a poet is capable of doing that he ceases to matter in the history of poetry. Richard Shusterman rightly observes that the 'enduring demands preserved in a tradition make it capable of functioning as a synchronize structural system'. 5 Raman Selden observes that 'the standard theories of literature often combine these apparently disparate modes of thinking'.6 It is remarkable that these apparently disparate modes of thinking are disciplined by values. The relation between the new work of art and the tradition is another very complex idea enshrined in the essay. It is, however, true that the complete meaning of the poet is realized through his relationship with the tradition but the importance of individual talent cannot be set aside in a discussion on the Eliot's poetics. It is again noteworthy that the tradition and individual talent are not at a sharp contrast with each other but they are mutually complimentary. Eliot conceives tradition and individual talent as unifiable and show that the two have an equally important role to play in poetic creation. The views of Jean Michael

Rabate capture our attention. He commenting on the function of historical sense in the caste of an individual talent says : This requires that the "bones" belong to the individual who recomposes simultaneity at every moment without losing a combination of the timeless and the merely temporal.7 Individual talent is needed to acquire the sense of tradition. Eliot lays good emphasis on the idea of interactivity between the tradition and individual talent. If the individual talent needs to acquire tradition, then the individual talent in turn modifies tradition. Eliot ratifies the dynamic nature of tradition. The existing monument form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really 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 the whole are readjusted; and this in conformity between the old and the new.8 The above quoted lines make clear the cyclic interdependence between tradition and individual talent. Shusterman's view again oblige inclusion, 'Old and new elements', he points out, 'derive their meaning from their reciprocal relations of contrast and coherence, in a larger whole of tradition which they themselves constitute as parts'.9 It is evident from the views of Shusterman that tradition is not anything fixed or static but it is something dynamic and everchanging. Every new participation in the tradition results into restructuring of the same tradition with different emphasis. It is constantly growing and changing and becoming different from what it has been earlier. The past directs the present and is modified by the present. This is an apt revelation of the traditional capabilities of a poet. The past helps us understand the present and the present throws light on the past. The new work of art is judged by the standards set by the past. It is in the light of the past alone that an individual talent can be. This is the way Eliot subtly reconciles the tradition and the individual talent. Eliot's views on tradition paves way for the theorization of the impersonality in art and poetry. Divergent views about Eliot's theory of objectivity have been discussed but it is observed that critics tend to generalize the theory to a common experience. It is noticeable that the impersonality that Eliot discusses in his criticism does not imply a mechanical objectivity of a hoarding painter, but, it owes its genesis to the personality that emerges out of the creative personality of the poet. It is understandable that Eliot denies an outright and blind adherence to some peculiar faiths and belief but an emancipation from what is very personal on peculiar. He says :

...... the poet has not a personality to express but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experience combine in a peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.10 It is clear from the above quotation that Eliot lays heavy stress on the two different aspect of a creator what he is as an individual and at the same time what he is as a creator; It is an easy inference from the above equation that Eliot's to his critical theories discards the emotion of strictly personal significance and centers his ideals on the transformation of what is personal but something of universal significance. The above quoted excerpts from "Tradition and Individual Talent" put forth a belligerently anti romantic view of poetry which lays emphasis on poetry and discards the very idea of the personality of the poet. It is obligatory to remember Aristotle as this point of time who, against all odds takes 'plot' to be the 'soul of the tragedy' and claims that 'there can be tragedy than a character but not without a plot'.11 Eliot in these lines discovers a new possibility of a universal meaning, which free from the whims and eccentricities of the poet and has a wider significance. The comparison made out by Eliot between the mind of the poet and the catalyst in a chemical reaction further confirms the point of view. He says : When the two gases, previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place, only if the platinum is present, nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected.12 The analogy that Eliot puts forth makes it clear that the poetry is something entirely different from what is the personal identity of the poet. This is principally the reason that Eliot, all along the length and breadth of his critical writings, makes frequent use of terms like 'transmate', 'transform', 'digest', etc. He further suggests : ... but the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.13 Eliot''s Concept of Poetry and the importance he lays on tradition, with reference to his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent"

In 1919 T. S. Eliot wrote the world famous essay Tradition and Individual Talent, a very

potent essay pregnant with many concepts, among them poetry and tradition being the major one. His concept of poetry was primarily an attack on the romantic concept of poetry especially Eliot attacked Wordsworths famous concept Poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity. Eliot was completely against this romantic concept of poetry because for him poetry is not recollection of feeling but poetry is a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences and for Eliot this concentration does not happen consciously or deliberately. For Eliot poetry is not a turning loose of emotions, but an escape from emotions, it is not the expression of the personality but an escape from personality. For romantics poetry was expression of personality of the poet but Eliot believed that the personal experiences important for a man may not have any place in his poems. He firmly believed that the personal life and personal emotions however important may not be important for the poet, as a poet. For Eliot what matters is emotions transmuted in the poem feelings expressed in the poetry. For Eliot the emotion of art is impersonal and dispassionate and the artist can achieve this impersonality only by cultivating the historical sense and by being conscious of the traditions. For Eliot the poet must merge his personality with tradition, in this essay he says that the progress of the artist is the continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. For Eliot mind of a poet is a medium in which experiences can enter into new combinations that is why he says that poet is a catalyst and poets mind is a receptacle which holds numberless feelings images, phrases and emotions. T. S. Eliot (Tradition and the Individual Talent) T.S. Eliots Tradition and Individual Talent is one of the critical essay in which Eliot has described with concept of tradition, individual talent, emotion and poetry as well as his concept of depersonalized art. In the opening of the essay, Eliots defines tradition, which is the literary history. He says that each and every nation has its individual genius who create literature. So many such individual writers produce a big bulk of writing which is tradition. In other words, tradition is the matter of past that is even related to present because it is in the process of formation. Eliot gives an example of English literature produced from the Anglo Saxon period up to the present day. It is like a wall where there are so many bricks working commonly. Eliot also says that when a writer comes to write at present. He should be aware of the tradition. To learn the tradition he should have a great labor but he should not imitate it. Learning the tradition is also called historical sense that is necessary to the

present writer, because tradition as the past influences. Eliot even says that the new writer writing at present becomes the part of tradition so he has to learn the tradition but not imitate it. No writers and writings have value in isolation, the writer and his writing would not be evaluated with the writers of the past, he should be compared and contrasted with the tradition, it is possible to examine his individual talent. If the new writer has imitated the tradition, blindly such slavish imitation should be discouraged because it has not individual talent. Individual talent is the novelty or newness. If the present writer has brought something novelty in his writing, it is called individual talent such novelty should be encourage because it suggests the genius of the writer. Eliot has also given his personal idea about the depersonalization of art, which is also called impersonal poetry. He says that emotions and feelings are related to poetry but they should be expressed indirectly and objectively. In other words, Eliot says that emotions of the poet are expressed in poetry but the poet should in personify them. His concept is against the concept of words being involved in poetry. Instead, the poet should not be identified as the direct speaker in poetry but he should indirectly speak through the characters or other objects, which is called objective correlative. So Eliot says Poetry is not the turning loose of emotion but escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality but escape from it. In order to support his concept of depersonalized art, Eliot uses and analogy related to gas chamber. In a gas chamber during the process of forming sulpheric acid, sulpherdioxide and oxygen are needed but they do not react until a plate of platinum is kept. When the platinum is kept there, it causes reaction between them so that sulpheric acid is formed. In the acid platinum does not become present. This analogy is applied in the process of poetic creation. The poet or his mind is a catalyst like the platinum to change others, medium but as if the platinum is not present in the acid, the poet also should not be present in poetry. His role is very crucial because with out the poet, poetry is not possible to create. But, in the creation he should be totally dead or absent like the platinum absent in acid. It is his concept of impersonal art and he criticizes many English poets including Words Worth who have not become impersonal. He appreciates metaphysical poets such as John Donne to be impersonal in poetry. Tradition and the Individual Talent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary theorist T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published, in two parts, in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood" (1920).[1] The essay is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays". While Eliot is most often known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary theory. In this dual role, he acted as poet-critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the more well known works that Eliot produced in his critic capacity. It formulates Eliots influential conception of the relationship between the poet and the literary tradition which precedes him. Wikisource has original text related to this article: Tradition and the Individual Talent Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. He wishes to correct for the fact that, as he perceives it, "in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence." Eliot posits that, though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses through change - a separation from tradition, literary advancements are instead recognized only when they conform to the tradition. Eliot, a classicist, felt that the true incorporation of tradition into literature was unrecognized, that tradition, a word that "seldom... appear[s] except in a phrase of censure," was actually a thus-far unrealized element of literary criticism. For Eliot, the term "tradition" is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents a "simultaneous order," by which Eliot means a historical timelessness a fusion of past and present and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously, expressing his contemporary environment. Eliot challenges our common perception that a poets greatness and individuality lies in his departure from his predecessors. Rather, Eliot argues that "the most individual parts of his (the poet) work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Eliot claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.

But, this fidelity to tradition does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process. Novelty is possible, and only possible, through tapping into tradition. When a poet engages in the creation of new work, he realizes an aesthetic "ideal order," as it has been established by the literary tradition that has come before him. As such, the act of artistic creation does not take place in a vacuum. The introduction of a new work alters the cohesion of this existing order, and causes a readjustment of the old in order to accommodate the new. Thus, the inclusion of the new work alters the way in which the past is seen, elements of the past that are noted and realized. In Eliots own words: "What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it." Eliot refers to this organic tradition, this developing canon, as the "mind of Europe." The private mind is subsumed by this more massive one. This leads to Eliots so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalization. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channeled and elaborated. He compares the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesized to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art is not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesized. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalized vessel, a mere medium. Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal his own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channeling them through the intensity of poetry, he expresses feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition.

Another essay found in Selected Essays relates to this notion of the impersonal poet. In "Hamlet and His Problems" Eliot presents the phrase "objective correlative." The theory is that the expression of emotion in art can be achieved by a specific, and almost formulaic, prescription of a set of objects, including events and situations. A particular emotion is created by presenting its correlated objective sign. The author is depersonalized in this conception, since he is the mere effecter of the sign. And, it is the sign, and not the poet, which creates emotion. The implications here separate Eliots idea of talent from the conventional definition (just as his idea of Tradition is separate from the conventional definition), one so far from it, perhaps, that he chooses never to directly label it as talent. Whereas the conventional definition of talent, especially in the arts, is a genius that one is born with. Not so for Eliot. Instead, talent is acquired through a careful study of poetry, claiming that Tradition, "cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour." Eliot asserts that it is absolutely necessary for the poet to study, to have an understanding of the poets before him, and to be well versed enough that he can understand and incorporate the "mind of Europe" into his poetry. But the poets study is unique it is knowledge which "does not encroach," and which does not "deaden or pervert poetic sensibility." It is, to put it most simply, a poetic knowledge knowledge observed through a poetic lens. This ideal implies that knowledge gleaned by a poet is not knowledge of facts, but knowledge which leads to a greater understanding of the mind of Europe. As Eliot explains, "Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum." [edit] Eliot and New Criticism Unwittingly, Eliot inspired and informed the movement of New Criticism. This is somewhat ironic, since he later criticized their excruciatingly detailed analysis of texts. Yet, he does share with them the same focus on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of poetry, rather than on its ideological content. The New Critics resemble Eliot in their close analysis of particular passages and poems. [edit] Criticism of Eliot Eliots theory of literary tradition has been criticized for its limited definition of what constitutes the canon of that tradition. He assumes the authority to choose what represents

great poetry, and his choices have been criticized on several fronts. For example, Harold Bloom disagrees with Eliots condescension of Romantic poetry, which, in The Metaphysical Poets (1921) he criticizes for its "dissociation of sensibility." Moreover, many believe Eliots discussion of the literary tradition as the "mind of Europe" reeks of Euro-centrism. (on the same note it should be recognized that Eliot supported many Eastern and thus non-European works of literature such as the Mahabharata. Eliot was arguing the importance of a complete sensibility: he didn't particularly care what it was at the time of tradition and the individual talent.) He does not account for a non-white and non-masculine tradition. As such, his notion of tradition stands at odds with feminist, post-colonial and minority theories. Kenyan author James Ngugi advocated (in a memo entitled "On the Abolition of the English Department") a commitment to native works, which speak to ones own culture, as compared to deferring to an arbitrary notion of literary excellence. As such, he implicitly attacks Eliots subjective criterion in choosing an elite body of literary works. Post-colonial critic Chinua Achebe also challenges Eliot, since he argues against deferring to those writers, including Joseph Conrad, who have been deemed great, but only represent a specific (and perhaps prejudiced) cultural perspective. Harold Bloom presents a conception of tradition that differs from that of Eliot. Whereas Eliot believes that the great poet is faithful to his predecessors and evolves in a concordant manner, Bloom (according to his theory of "anxiety of influence") envisions the "strong poet" to engage in a much more aggressive and tumultuous rebellion against tradition. In 1964, his last year, Eliot published in a reprint of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1932 and 1933, a new preface in which he called "Tradition and the Individual Talent" the most juvenile of his essays (although he also indicated that he did not repudiate it.)[2] Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes The Damaged Psyche of Humanity Like many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I challenged cultural notions of masculine identity, causing artists to question the

romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general crisis of masculinity as survivors struggled to find their place in a radically altered society. As for England, the aftershocks of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution of the British Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) demonstrates this sense of indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker wonders whether he should eat a piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep living. Humanitys collectively damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including A Game of Chess (the second part of The Waste Land) and The Hollow Men. The Power of Literary History Eliot maintained great reverence for myth and the Western literary canon, and he packed his work full of allusions, quotations, footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. In The Tradition and the Individual Talent, an essay first published in 1919, Eliot praises the literary tradition and states that the best writers are those who write with a sense of continuity with those writers who came before, as if all of literature constituted a stream in which each new writer must enter and swim. Only the very best new work will subtly shift the streams current and thus improve the literary tradition. Eliot also argued that the literary past must be integrated into contemporary poetry. But the poet must guard against excessive academic knowledge and distill only the most essential bits of the past into a poem, thereby enlightening readers. The Waste Land juxtaposes fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage is both a reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his examination of society and humanity. The Changing Nature of Gender Roles Over the course of Eliots life, gender roles and sexuality became increasingly flexible, and Eliot reflected those changes in his work. In the repressive Victorian era of the nineteenth century, women were confined to the domestic sphere, sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical atmosphere dictated most social interactions. Queen Victorias death in 1901 helped usher in a new era of excess and forthrightness, now called the

Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I, from 1914 to 1918, further transformed society, as people felt both increasingly alienated from one another and empowered to break social mores. English women began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in 1918, and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol in public. Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that began accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather than as absolute identities dictated by society. Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern age. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reflects the feelings of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from World War I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners. Prufrock, unable to make a decision, watches women wander in and out of a room, talking of Michelangelo (14), and elsewhere admires their downy, bare arms. A disdain for unchecked sexuality appears in both Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918) and The Waste Land. The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive sexuality. Nevertheless, the poems central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphroditeand his powers of prophesy and transformation are, in some sense, due to his male and female genitalia. With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in one body. Motifs Fragmentation Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts against one another. In Eliots view, humanitys psyche had been shattered by World War I and by the collapse of the British Empire. Collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one poetic work was a way for Eliot to represent humanitys damaged psyche and the modern world, with its barrage of sensory perceptions. Critics read the following line from The Waste Land as a statement of Eliots poetic project: These fragments I have shored against my ruins (431). Practically every line in The Waste Land echoes an

academic work or canonical literary text, and many lines also have long footnotes written by Eliot as an attempt to explain his references and to encourage his readers to educate themselves by delving deeper into his sources. These echoes and references are fragments themselves, since Eliot includes only parts, rather than whole texts from the canon. Using these fragments, Eliot tries to highlight recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition, as well as to place his ideas about the contemporary state of humanity along the spectrum of history. Mythic and Religious Ritual Eliots tremendous knowledge of myth, religious ritual, academic works, and key books in the literary tradition informs every aspect of his poetry. He filled his poems with references to both the obscure and the well known, thereby teaching his readers as he writes. In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot explains the crucial role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew heavily from ancient fertility rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an effigy. The Fisher King is, in turn, linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight quests to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ultimately, ritual fails as the tool for healing the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities, including Hindu chants, Buddhist speeches, and pagan ceremonies. Later poems take their images almost exclusively from Christianity, such as the echoes of the Lords Prayer in The Hollow Men and the retelling of the story of the wise men in Journey of the Magi (1927). Infertility Eliot envisioned the modern world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could conceive. In The Waste Land, various characters are sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with either reproductive or nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality (according to myth, his impotence causes the land to wither and dry up), Tiresias represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in A Game of Chess represent an out-of-control sexuality. World War I not only eradicated an entire generation of young men in Europe but also ruined the land. Trench warfare and chemical weapons, the two primary methods by which the war was fought, decimated plant life, leaving behind detritus and carnage. In The Hollow Men, the speaker discusses the dead land, now filled with stone and cacti. Corpses salute the stars with their

upraised hands, stiffened from rigor mortis. Trying to process the destruction has caused the speakers mind to become infertile: his head has been filled with straw, and he is now unable to think properly, to perceive accurately, or to conceive of images or thoughts. Symbols Water In Eliots poetry, water symbolizes both life and death. Eliots characters wait for water to quench their thirst, watch rivers overflow their banks, cry for rain to quench the dry earth, and pass by fetid pools of standing water. Although water has the regenerative possibility of restoring life and fertility, it can also lead to drowning and death, as in the case of Phlebas the sailor from The Waste Land. Traditionally, water can imply baptism, Christianity, and the figure of Jesus Christ, and Eliot draws upon these traditional meanings: water cleanses, water provides solace, and water brings relief elsewhere in The Waste Land and in Little Gidding, the fourth part of Four Quartets. Prufrock hears the seductive calls of mermaids as he walks along the shore in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but, like Odysseus in Homers Odyssey (ca. 800 b.c.e.), he realizes that a malicious intent lies behind the sweet voices: the poem concludes we drown (131). Eliot thus cautions us to beware of simple solutions or cures, for what looks innocuous might turn out to be very dangerous. The Fisher King The Fisher King is the central character in The Waste Land. While writing his long poem, Eliot drew on From Ritual to Romance, a 1920 book about the legend of the Holy Grail by Miss Jessie L. Weston, for many of his symbols and images. Westons book examined the connections between ancient fertility rites and Christianity, including following the evolution of the Fisher King into early representations of Jesus Christ as a fish. Traditionally, the impotence or death of the Fisher King brought unhappiness and famine. Eliot saw the Fisher King as symbolic of humanity, robbed of its sexual potency in the modern world and connected to the meaninglessness of urban existence. But the Fisher King also stands in for Christ and other religious figures associated with divine resurrection and rebirth. The speaker of What the Thunder Said fishes from the banks of the Thames toward the end of the poem as the thunder sounds Hindu chants into the air. Eliots scene echoes the scene in the Bible in

which Christ performs one of his miracles: Christ manages to feed his multitude of followers by the Sea of Galilee with just a small amount of fish. Music and Singing Like most modernist writers, Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera, and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low culture by juxtaposing lyrics from an opera by Richard Wagner with songs from pubs, American ragtime, and Australian troops. Eliot splices nursery rhymes with phrases from the Lords Prayer in The Hollow Men, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is, as the title, implies a song, with various lines repeated as refrains. That poem ends with the song of mermaids luring humans to their deaths by drowninga scene that echoes Odysseuss interactions with the Sirens in the Odyssey. Music thus becomes another way in which Eliot collages and references books from past literary traditions. Elsewhere Eliot uses lyrics as a kind of chorus, seconding and echoing the action of the poem, much as the chorus functions in Greek tragedies. "To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim, T.S. Eliot declares in his acclaimed essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917). In the essay Eliot reintroduces the notion of the inconspicuous artist- the old classical interpretation of the artist-asmirror- which went out of fashion in the early Romantic period and was replaced with a radically new view that placed the authors interior life at center. The points made in Eliots essay soon became some of the key concepts of the Formalist critics, particularly the New Critics, who advocated a kind of criticism that, to quote Eliot, is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. Eliot later distanced himself from New Criticism, calling it the lemonsqueezer school of criticism and referring to their work as bogus scholarship. Nevertheless, his influence on their method of analysis, whether intended or not, is palpably evident. The critic should avoid excessive attention to the poet, Eliot explains, because no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone . . . you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. . . as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. According to Eliot, facts about the poets public or personal life will lead nowhere, since the mind of the tradition is much more important than his own private mind. The poets task,

then, is to become a finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations, rather than to become the discoverer and expressor of new emotions. The artists proper goal, Eliot declares, should be the continual extinction of personality, not its development and expression.

If the artist's objective is the dissolution of personality, what then is left to create the art? Addressing this problem, Eliot goes on to clarify what he sees as the distinction between the man and the poet. Casting doubt on the theory of the substantial unity of the soul, he argues that men- or at least men of artistic inclination- are divided into two separate and conflicting entities, man and poet. Since the personality, emotional life, feelings, and so forth of the man disappear in the works of the great poets, biographical consideration has no place in assessing the work of art. Though the man himself may have a personality, in his art he must either subdue or transform it, in order that he may function only as a medium in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Thus, the task of the poet, Eliot concludes, is ultimately the escape from the self. 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. In typical Eliot fashion, he ends the section with a concession, perhaps a subtle admission that his argument is a tad polemic and overstated. He concedes that these subjective aspects of the man, whose destruction he has here been advocating, are indeed the starting point of art. But, of course, he writes, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.