ELIOT, AGAINST ROMANTIC AND MORAL APPROACH:
When Eliot appeared on the English literary scene, he found
himself face to face with the great theorist of the romantic revival, William
Wordsworth and also with Matthew Arnold, his own predecessor who advocated for
morality in poetry. To Eliot, the present atmosphere of romanticism and
moralism in literature was unbearable and intolerable. So, Eliot could well cry
with Hamlet:
"The time is out
of joint: o cursed spite
That ever I was born to
set it right."
True, T. S. Eliot was born to set English poetry in the right
direction, the attempt of which is found in his critical manifesto 'Tradition
and Individual Talent'.
HIS CONCEPT OF IMPERSONAL POETRY:
Unlike the romantic revival, Eliot gives much emphasis upon
maintaining a restrain and control and does not support the view that under the
divine inspiration, the poet is given freedom to say whatever he pleases.
Eliot, for the first time rang the bell, proclaiming his opposite stand. He
professed:
"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."
Thus, true poetry has got to be impersonal. This is the
fundamental argument raised by Eliot. According to him, while creating poetry,
the poet has to remain absolutely free from the personal emotions as he
experienced in the past. The man who experiences and the poet who creates
cannot be one and the same. He writes:
"The more perfect
the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be
the man who suffers
and the mind which
creates."
WRITING POETRY - A SCIENTIFIC PROCESS:
According to Eliot, the poet has to be impersonal and
objective in his approach while writing poetry. The beginning of the 20th
century was the beginning of new scientific and technology advancements and
Eliot was much influenced by the recent development of science. Eliot adopts
scientific approach in his theory of poetry. He compares writing poetry to a
chemical process:
"When the two
gases, previously mentioned (Oxygen and Sulphur dioxide) 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, this newly formed
acid contains no trace of platinum and the platinum itself is apparently
unaffected."
Eliot says that while writing poetry, the emotions and experiences
of the poet are mixed together in the presence of a catalyst called the mind of
the poet. When the poetry is created, the mind of the poet remains totally
unaffected and there is no impact of the poet's mind and personality on the
newly created poetry. In this way, Eliot wants to prove that writing poetry is
an objective and scientific activity, in which the poet and his poetry remain
detached at the end.
HIS CONCEPT OF TRADITION:
Eliot says that while in the process of creation, the poet
has to surrender himself completely to his tradition. No artist can exist in a
vacuum. Every poet is a product of his time. He is a product of his past social
and cultural milieu.
Eliot defines tradition as "the collective
personality...realized in the literature of the past.” Eliot’s conception of
tradition is a dynamic one. According to him, tradition is not anything fixed
or static; it is dynamic, always changing, growing and becoming different from
what it is. A writer who is a product of his past but adds something to his own
tradition and hence his tradition gets influenced by his own newly created
works. So tradition keeps on changing with time.
HIS CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL SENSE:
As we discussed earlier, the poet adds to and influences his
own tradition. But for that, the poet has to undergo a lot of toil. Tradition
does not automatically come down or flow down to him. To acquire the tradition,
the poet has to acquire what Elliot calls "the historical sense".
This historical sense involves "a perception not only of the past, but
also of its presence.” The poet has not only to be a man well saturated in the
literature of the past and present, but has to generate in him "a feeling
for all literatures as one unit - collective personality.” This awareness of
the collective personality of literature is what Eliot calls "the
historical science."
THE ROLE OF INDIVIDUAL TALENT:
Eliot places himself on a safe ground by declaring that the
relationship between the tradition and the individual artist is not that of
complete subordination of the later to the former. According to him, the new
works of art are influenced by the past works (tradition) but once the new
works are produced, they modify the tradition as well. After the publication of
new works, there is a slight re-ordering of the whole tradition. Thus, the
past, in the process of influencing the present, gets influenced by the new
works of art. Hence, Eliot gives importance to the individual talent also.
POETRY AS AN ART OF ORGANIZATION:
Unlike Plato and Wordsworth, poetry according to Eliot, is
not divine inspiration. Instead, it is an organization of great number of
varied emotions and experience. Hundreds of emotions, thoughts and experiences
are stored up in the mind of the poet and the poet amalgamates all these to
create something new (poetry) out of them. The process of writing poetry,
therefore, is the process of organization of these different experiences,
feelings and thoughts into something new. The greatness of the poem does not
depend on the type of pleasure it gives; it does not depend on the type of
moral messages it offers; but it mainly depends on the type of order, harmony
and unity it gives to the poem. So a good poet must have a perfect art of
organization - organization of emotions, experiences and thoughts.
CONCLUSION:
Thus, to conclude, the theory of impersonal poetry propounded
by T. S. Eliot in his essay 'Tradition and Individual Talent' aims to save
poetry from the wayward, fanciful and whimsical ideas of the romanticists. This
essay tries to show a way to artistic perfection by means of developing
historical sense and by insisting upon a balance between the past and the
present. Eliot, who lived during the age of science and technology, adopted a
scientific approach while defining poetry and he brushed away all the romantic
and moral theories of Wordsworth and Arnold. In his objective approach to
poetry he has been rightly termed as one of the important pillars of new
criticism.
I. A. Richards also accepted his dominance and remarked:
"In one degree or
another, we are all products of his work."
Dr. Leavis concludes the importance of the essay in the
following words:
"It was on this
essay pre-eminently that was
based Eliot reputation
as a thinker."
A. G. George points out:
"Eliot's theory of
the impersonality of poetry is the greatest theory on the nature of the poetic
process after Wordsworth's romantic conception of poetry."
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