TS Eliot: Tradition and The Individual Talent


 * T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
 * Born in St. Louis, MO to a businessman father and poetess mother
 * Studied philosophy at Harvard, where he “absorbed at inveterate hostility to Romanticism”
 * Moved to England in 1909
 * Began writing poetry after spending a year (1910-1911) in France “where his encounters with the French symbolists … helped him find his own voice”
 * “Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) was a major contribution to the Modernist movement in poetry, characterized by the combination of hard clear images, mysterious and transcendent symbols, and an almost classical restraint of subjective feeling”
 * “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
 * “The Waste Land” (1922) – “Modernism’s epic of decay: an elegy upon the desiccation and near-death of the poet’s own spirit with odd Buddhistic conclusion ambiguously suggesting the hope of renewal and rebirth”
 * Art should be impersonal
 * Wanted writers to move past expressing their personality/ feelings, to write poetry that was completely devoid of the author’s personality.
 * Objective, everything very intentional
 * Like acting, “my meaning is that the poet has no personality to express, but a medium.”
 * For the Romantics everything was expressive, that was the prevailing the criticism, to understand it as an expression of the author’s thoughts/ feelings.
 * Eliot – the poet is not center to the work he is creating, the mode through which he creates.
 * Impersonality. The emotion shouldn’t come principally from the poet’s expressions, should come from objective correlative.
 * Should not gush emotion and feeling, but rather choose something or a situation that would evoke the emotion from the reader.
 * Modernism
 * New Criticism movement:
 * “Objective correlative” Hamlet
 * “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words a set of objects,a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
 * “Theory of the dissociation of sensibility”
 * …Something… had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browningl it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odor of the rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is  perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man;s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes”
 * “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
 * “criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our mind when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.”
 * We compare one poet’s work to other poets when we praise it, by stressing “upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. It is in these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find 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.“
 * “No poet, no artist of any, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciate of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value his alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
 * “the past shall be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”
 * It is a judgement, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not to really conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value — a test it is true, which can only be slowly and consciously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: It appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardy  likely to find that it is one and not the other.”
 * The poet “must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that material of art is never quite the same.”
 * “… a mind which changes and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen.”
 * “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but the poetry.”
 * “… 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.”
 * “for my meaning is, that 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 experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”
 * “The business of the 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.”
 * Eliot quotes Wordsworth, showing the change from expressionism to modern/neoclassical thought on poetry: “Consequently, we must believe that ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility.  It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.”
 * The change from poetry expressing the thoughts and experiences of the poet an impersonal, almost fictional thing.
 * “In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to 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.”
 * A poet has to excise his feeling and emotion to write good poetry; a poet has immerse himself wholly in his work. “And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past; unless he is conscious, not of what what is dead, but of what is already living.
 * All art has built from the past, it a changing thing. Never new, only different.
 * Formalism
 * Early 20th century
 * Literariness – what makes a given text literary, only the linguistics
 * Not why something something happens, but how it happens (literary methods used, the languge used)
 * New Criticism
 * Goal was to only look at the text itself and how it was put together (irony,etc.,)
 * Called a closed reading
 * Inspired by T.S. Elliot