T.S.Eliot(Tradition and Individual Talent)

Department of English

Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai

Semester: 2

Class: M.A. Part: 1

Roll No: 29

Email Id: vanitabaldaniya0806gmail.com

Paper: 7 (Literary Theory and Criticism)

Work Form: Assignment

Guidance by: Dilipsir Barad.

Topic:

   T.S.Eliot’s Tradition and Individual Talent

                            (1920)

    About the poet:

                   Often hailed as the successor to poet-critics such as John Dryden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, T. S.Eliot’s literary criticism informs his poetry just as his experience as a poet shape his critical work. Though famous for insisting on objectivity” in art, Eliot’s essays actually map a highly personal set of preoccupation responses and ideas about specific authors and works of art, as well as formulate more general theories on the connections between poetry, culture and society.

         Perhaps his best- known essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent” was first published in 1919 and soon after included in The Sacred wood: essays on poetry and criticism (1920). Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he essentially impersonal”, that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Until the middle of the last century, Eliot’s idea of tradition was extraordinary influential.

       As he did write in ‘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: Eliot is part of that which we know. However unconsciously. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is still potentially a remarkably fertile essay- contradiction, and at some level it knows it. It is self- conscious as a critical performance, and anticipates any deconstructive reading. These qualities inhere in its elliptical style, where corners are cut, logic is slippery, and the progression from one sentence to the next can be mercurial.

                   The Historical Sense

          Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual involving something he describes as “the Historical Sense” which is a perception of “the Pastness of the past” but also of its “presence”. For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”, however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself.

          This vies, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”. Requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary history- non just immediate past but the distant past and not just the literature of his or her own country but the whole “mind of Europe”.

        Eliot’s second point is one of his most famous and contentions. A poet, Eliot maintains must; self sacrifice”, to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieves, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a more medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a “mature” poet’s mind works by being a passive “receptacle” of image, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new” art emotion”.

          For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of the a greater ability which to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge. Though Eliot’s belief that;

                   “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”.

          Sprang from what he viewed as the excesses of Romanticism, many scholars have noted how continuous Eliot’s thought and the Romantics” his impersonal poet”. Even has links with John Keats, who proposed a similar figure in “the chameleon poet”. But Eliot’s belief that critical study should be “diverted” from the poet to the poetry shaped the study of poetry for half a century, and while “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has had many detractors, especially those who question Eliot’s insistence on is difficult to overemphasize the essay’s influence.

                   In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence, we cannot refer to ‘the tradition” or "to a tradition” at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of so and so is “traditional” or even “too Traditional”.

                   Eliot’s biographer Peter Ackroyd describes well the appeal to Eliot of Bradley’s book Appearance and Reality : to recognize the limitations of ordinary knowledge and experience but yet to see that when they are organized into a coherent whole they might vouchsafe glimpses of absolute truth there is balm here for one trapped in the world and yet seeking some other, invaded by sensations and yet wishing to understand and to order them. Immediate experience gained through what Bradley calls “Finite Centres” is incomplete, and even ‘mad’, but it is all that is valid for the individual:

“All significant truth are Private truth” But the thesis would somehow break out of solipsism.

                   To view present anarchy in the light of an ordered past might make it appear less anarchy. But that past is ordered only from our present perspective, and so the order was never actual but always only ideal. The statement in “Tradition and Individual Talent” ’that, this essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism’ sounds like a covert admission that ‘the historical sense’ cannot provide a basis in actuality for order. By declining to go beyond, even as it calls attention to, that frontier, the essay presents an intriguingly unresolved tension between reality and ideality.

          Impersonality- the closet Romantic

          The second part of “Tradition and Individual Talent” shifts from tradition and the historical sense to the individual practicing poet. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one  not precisely in any valuation of “personality”’ not being necessarily more interesting, or having” more to say”, but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

          The theory of impersonality does not any subjectivism but ‘set out to put the author in his place, and to liberate the poem from his narcissism. Thus the second part of ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ frequently strays into psychological terminology in spite of itself. It invites inspection of all that it would- ward off, a prurience encouraged by the evasive statement that only those who have personality and emotions knows what it means to want to escape from these things. And the ‘scientific, seemingly objective chemical analogy for the creative process, whose purpose is to denigrate the work of art as an expressive medium, reads today like a smoke screen.

                    As Edward Lobb argues in his book, T.S.Eliot and the Romantic critical Tradition, the idea of a dissociation of sensibility is,

             “The story of Eden applied to the                              

              Secular history, of literature and

                 As such is a ‘literary myth was first

                 Put forward by the Romantics; Eliot’s

                 View of literary history is… basically

                Romantic in its nostalgia for a lost “

                Golden age.”

        Literary and Social-Political Hierarchies

       Political criticism, originating in England and as its name implies, essentially pragmatic, was given theoretical backbone by the new criticism, which, formulated by a group of American southern agrarian poet- critics, elaborated a system describing the text not as an expressive medium but as a formal unity and autonomous’ object, to be examined without regard to any contextual considerations, historical, authorial. For instance. It informs his imperialist apologetic, which have literary as well as political implications, and which draw on a long tradition of pan-European thinking.

          I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light- or darkness- of these observations:

  “And now methinks I could even chide myself

   For doating on her beauty, though her death

   Shall be revenged after no common action.

  Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors

  For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

 Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships

 For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

  Why does you fellow falsify highways,

  And put his life between the judge’s lips,

 To refine such a thing-keeps horse and men

  To beat their valours for her…?”

                   In this passage there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction towards beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it.

               For Eliot, the implications for a European literary tradition are clear: as he writes in his essay’ what is a classic?

        “Each literature has its greatness

          Not in isolation, but because of

          Its place in a larger pattern,

         A pattern set in Rome”.

           Thus the several European literatures are parts of a larger pattern, and they cannot survive without maintaining their position as part of that pattern, that greater whole, Latin is the universal language, the ideal to which the European vernaculars should aspire, but which they can never attain.

                   Legacies: Theory

           It is not necessary to share this outmoded in a European ideal order’- a belief that underlies Eliot’s espousal, and linking of Royalist in politics, classicism in literature, and Anglo-Catholicism in religion- to learn, even today, from his idea of tradition.

            There have been, and continue to be, important implication here for the theory and practice of literary criticism. Tradition, not as an inheritance but as the invention of anyone who is prepared to expend the necessary labor and sweat, means that everyone it free to create their private pantheon of precursors according to their own literary tastes and obsessions: Eliot’s simultaneous order’ depends on ‘a principle of aesthetic not merely historical criticism’.

          The argument in ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’ gives legitimacy to the idea of the text as an object of perpetual reinterpretation. Reader- response and reception theories have elaborated on this approach.

        Sharratt sees Eliot’s ideas as the precursor to some central postmodernist tendencies: Eliot’s ‘construction of history’ being based essentially on literary taste, anticipates

          “The deeper superficialities of

            Post-modernism’, resulting in

            ‘a textual reshuffling of an

             Endlessly expanding but

             Unreliable archive with no 

             Verifiable validity”.

             Legacies: Poetry

            One of the motives impelling ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ no doubt also impelled The Waste Land a few tears later. The poem thus intimates Eliot’s idea of tradition, projecting the subjective presence of a past out of which to create some sort of order, which in this case would be the poem itself, an order perhaps inchoate, potential, and barely discernible: but the elements are there.

            This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusion as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion; emotion has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.

           So, In last conclude, about the critic, T. S. Eliot and his famous work ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ about introduction above as under and describe the all deeply introduction.