T. S. Eliot's criticism offers both a reaction and a re-assessment. Justify
The outstanding literary critic in the present century is T. S. Eliot, whose volume The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) reviews the great English Critics from Sidney to Arnold. Other critical works are The Sacred Wood (1920) and After Strange Gods (1933). His own attitude is one of strong reaction against the moods and preoccupations of the romantics, and he clings to such surviving rocks of the traditional order as have not been swept away by modern fields of thought and morality.
He denies the romantic supposition that it is the principal business of poetry to express the unique personality, and individual experience, of the poet. On the contrary, Eliot urges that poetry should progress through "a continual extinction of personality. The poet should possess a historical sense and should write from a far wider standpoint than that of his own experience of life since it is only with reference to the timeless order of things that his own thought has any significance, Faithfulness to tradition does not, therefore, mean for Eliot adherence to this or that form or diction that would be mere imitation.
The poet has perforce to use images ("the objective correlative') which in his own life since childhood have become charged with emotions for him. Thus, although Eliot's poetry is that of a traditionalist, he refuses to use conventional "poetic" imagery and situations which have become standardized.
The "objective correlative" of Eliot is the dreariness and fecklessness of contemporary urban life, contrasted with a more gracious past. But the past is not invoked by direct description: it is rather summoned to the memory by means of literary allusions, sometimes obvious but often erectile, embedded in the text, and serving as points of orientation, by means of which the direction of current tendencies may be clarified and evalued.
"The notion of literary criticism as a record of 'travels in realms of gold was suitable to the romantic mood. Victorianism brought about some change in this attitude and criticism came to be viewed as a serious intellectual exercise. The long revolution was however, to be completed only with the turn of the century.
This was specially characteristic of the twenties when a scientific approach was employed and a serve analysis of literature undertaken. The approach came to be known as the "New Criticism", T. S. Eliot with Ezra Pound, I. A. Richards, Empson and Leavis, played a leading role in this reaction against romanticism. He is the modern representative of literary classicism, belonging to the tradition of Ben Jonson, Dryden and Samuel Johnson. In the words of Austin Warren, "Eliot has already become a classic of poetry and criticism.
New Criticism was a great influence on modern literature. It was not supposed to bring about a revolution but only to help in the restoration of standards which has been undermined by romanticism. The most drastic change was the revaluation of the metaphysical, even though this had started in the seventies of the last century. This does not mean that the criticism of T. S. Eliot was ineffective or weak.
John Wain rightly says, "Criticism consists largely in running hard to stay in the same place." Criticis are not iconoclasts but their task is to convince each generation that the great writers are great. In the use of poetry and the use of criticism, Eliot says, "Criticism is the adjustment of new objects in the foreground in proportion to the horizon." It is the same scene "viewed from a different perspective." Even today the hierarchy remains almost the same.
Eliot in The Sacred Wood laid down the postulates of his critical theory of poetry. His theory is known as the impersonal theory. Poetry is considered as a living organism. "Poetry." Mallarme said, "is not written with ideas but with words." W. H. Auden made an interesting observation when he said: "Why do you want to write poetry? It the young man answers: 'I have important things to say," then he is not a poet.
It he answers: "I like hanging around words listening to what theory says", then maybe he is going to be a poet." Poetry is no longer confined to the discectomy of personality and emotion, In fact, poetry is a process of depersonalization. According to Eliot, "the greatness of a work of art does not lie in the intensity of emotions but in the intensity of the artistic process.
" It is not the business of the poet to seek new emotions to express but to work out the ordinary ones into poetry. He rejects Words Worth's definition of poetry as "emotions recollected in tranquillity" Eliot observed, "Poetry is not turning loose of emotions, it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Poetic process is one of concentration rather than recollection, a concentration of "a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experienced at all.
I find this statement rather obscure because to me those experiences are the common-place objects Wordsworth had wanted to highlight. Also, this concentration includes recollection or recapitulation of experiences not in fragments but in a unified sense. These phrases are all from this Tradition and the Individual Talent which has achieved the status equal to Arnold's "The Study of Poetry" a locus classicus of modern criticism.
In this essay, Eliot reorients the term tradition and gives it a wider significance. He says it is our tendency to find out to what extent a writer is different from his predecessors, "where as if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of this 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."
But Eliot disparages the blind. imitative adherence to tradition by persons lacking in initiative. He wants us to accept the positive character of tradition. We do not inherit tradition as a birth - right but it is a thing to be acquired. In involves in the first place, the "historical sense." "The historical sense involves a perception, not of the pastness of past, but of its presence, the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his won 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.
"Nostalgic awareness of the past is a romantic attitude but to emphasize the presence of the past is to take an anti-romantic classical stand. John Wain says, "Historicity is indeed the gearbox of Eliot's criticism whereas creative sensibility is its engine. It dictates at what speed the engine should run, what kind of gradient to take." Thus his criticism has as its two coordinates tradition and sensibility.
While he is emphasizing tradition he warns the poet against the danger of too much scholarship. "He must know as much as will not encroach upon his poetic sensibility." The central point of this essay is his theory of dynamic traditionalism. He believes that the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual "extinction of personality."
In the second part of the essay, Eliot gives a chemical analogy to explain the process of depersonalization. Just as platinum is a catalytic agent in the preparation of sulphurous scid so is the mind of the poet. Perfect creation requires a sort of splitting up of the mind, one part assimilating the other. It is an odd way of expressing things but suitable to his temperament. "The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings.
phrases, images which remain there until all particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." This sort of emphasis on the poet's mind as a receptacle reduces the plot to a mechanical instrument producing poetry by simply switching it on. After Strange Gods which is probably his best-known essay, Eliot stated that his aim was to develop further the theme of "tradition and the individual talent."
David Daiches is of the view that this frontal attack launched against Victorian criticism was an attempt to take literary criticism out of the hands of laymen and confine it to professionals. Modern criticism faced with the problem passed by universal education tried to replace the unconscious process of appreciation by careful discrimination and appraisals carried out by a tiny minority in the interests of finer civilisation. It may be that Eliot exploited tradition as a successful weapon for this sort of discrimination. John Wains says: "The good critic should be topical and occasional.....
He should feel in him the growing points, the crises, the intersections of his culture....... Eliot says 'the true critic is the man, who is aware of the problems of the post to shed light on them in their present form. Eliot himself had no difficulty in accomplishing these twin aims. He was never set by the crisis of twentieth-century poetry in his own person, because he himself himself provoked them.
As for connecting the present and the past, it did not inconvenience him as he had been equipped with a useful polyglot. 'In the use of poetry and the use of criticism he observes Pure artistic appreciation is to my thinking only an ideal, when not merely a figment, and must be, so long as the appreciation of art is an affair of limited and transient human beings existing in time and space, both the audience and artist and limited."
Failing to reach a positive conclusion he now adopts a negative approach, from errors to their correction. "Critics perform a useful service merely by the fact that his error is of a different kind from the last, and the longer the sequence of critics we have. the greater amount of correction is possible."
Opinions differ among critics about the function of criticism in literature. To Mathew Arnold "criticism is the condition of great poetic creation." It is the business of critical power in all branches of knowledge, theology, and philosophy. history, art, and science to see the object as in it really is.
Thus it tends, at least, to make an intellectual situation in which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order to ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces, to make the best ideas prevail." Rather an immense job for a critic. Eliot also thinks that criticism must have an end in view which is "rough by speaking, elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste."
In the use of poetry and the use of criticism, he adds "the rudiment of criticism is the ability to select a good poem, and reject a bad poem, and its more serve test is of its ability to select a good 'new' poem, to respond properly to a new situation." We notice an immediate contrast between the role assigned to the critic by Arnold and Eliot. Eliot seems to have a more rational and practical approach. He is not vague or obscure but gives a very substantial argument. Eliot also establishes a link between critical and creative effort when he says in the same essay "The age of the best critic is the age of the best poet."
Eliot with all these assumptions before him succeeds to a large extent in observing them consistently throughout his works. he criticism does not concern itself with the paraphernalia of biographical, psychological, or Sociological aspects, although he has no grudge against these schools of criticism. In his introduction to the use of poetry and the use of criticism, he says: "The sociological and psychological are probably the two best-advertised varieties of modern criticism, but the number of ways in which the problems of criticism are approached was never before so great or so confusing."
It is worth mentioning that there is hardly any confusion in Eliot's criticism. He knows what he has to say and does not leave things. half said to be finished by our imagination. He was a great critic to combined so comfortably his encyclopaedic knowledge with his literary pursuits. He learning was a result of assimilated reading and keen sensibility. Eliot believes in the preservation of critical integrity and looks up ot Samual Johnson as a model critic. Eliot does not employ his essays for religious or political propaganda. Though a staunch Anglo-Catholic in religion, and royalist in politics, only is classical profile casts its shadow in his critical works.
Eliot's theory of impersonal art received a practical application when he brought in the idea of objective correlative' in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems. The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative, in other words, a set of objects, situations, 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."
Eliot did not intend this phrase which is not his coinage, but of George Santayana, to gain so much currency. It puts an emphasis on the verbal structure of the poem. Emotions are to be conveyed through a medium the medium of a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events. Cleanth Brooks says "The doctrine of objective corrective places a thoroughly antiromantic stress upon craftsmanship, but Eliot in the way in which he argues it, manages to involve himself in the language of expressionism."
What Eliot meant was that Shakespeare first 'planned the emotional background of Hamlet. i.e., how it was going to affect the audience, and then he used the object correlative, i.e. Hamlet to translate it. In fact, the success of a poet was to be measured by the extent to which he accomplished this aim. In the essay on metaphysical poets, he gives another interpretation of objective correlative: "They were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling."
Another concept which has influenced modern criticism is "dissociation of sensibility which explains his theory of the relation between thought and feeling. He said in "The metaphysical poets': "The poets of the seventeenth century possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.
They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante........ In the 17th century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have ever recovered, and this dissociation.......... was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden." as a critic he appreciated Donne because "he felt his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Tennyson and Browning could not do it. Milton subjected 'the language to a 'peculiar kind of deterioration'.
Collins, Gracy, and Johnson improved the English language but their feelings were crude. In the late 18th and 19th century poets. "thought and felt by fits." Eliot feels that a poet's function is not to diversity ideas but to transmute them into sensations. He calls it 'unified sensibility' which the 'metaphysical' possessed. Their conceits do not seem incongruous to him or." Violently yoked together" but unified and all heterogeneous elements compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind.
T. S. Eliot thus enhanced the prestige of metaphysics but he attacked Milto as a 'bad influence'. Dr Tillyard made the comment that Milton himself suffered from a disassociation of sensibility but that he was responsible for such dissociation in others is untrue. Eliot admits that it was his mistake to make that suggestion and then goes on to find the shortcomings in Milton's style. He concludes that Milton was a great poet (the greatest of all eccentrics) but he was not a poet's pet.
Shakespeare was among the few artists whom Eliot did not subject to a drastic revaluation. He accepted his greatness and so Shakespeare is still on his pedestal. The Augustans received a fillip due to their, restoration by Eliot Several critic's eminence have found fault with Eliot's criticism.
Elsio Vivas attacked Eliot's concept of "objective correlative". He contends that the poet only discovers his emotions by trying to formulate them. On Eliot's acknowledgement that poetry is a living organism, Ransom remarks "This is very nearly a doctrine of poetic automatism." Yvor Winters asserts that a classical reaction is not found. Eliot is classical enough. The anti-classicists have labelled Eliot's criticism. "workshop criticism.
" Eliot thought of himself as a practitioner concerned with understanding the masterpiece, giving it contemporary importance, persuading the audience that it is interesting, enjoyable, and active. Raymond has also levelled a grave charge against T S. Eliot: "The paradox of T. S. Eliot is that having launched a crusade in the name of austere intellectualism on behalf of tradition, he did his splendid best to destroy the ritual forms of poetry, accusing them of being 'dead' and showing himself right ahead of modernism." Scott James also had the same complaint against T. S. Eliot. He says: "It is easy to say what there is no in T. s. Eliot There is no joy, no exaltation, not even pleasure except the pleasure which is spurious."
Despite all these attacks, we all agree that Eliot is a powerful literary critic with remarkable critical integrity. George Orwell said: "Modern man is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. In our age music has become pop having the jungle rhythm, and painting is a riot of utter confusion, the labyrinth of drama absurd and gorical. Poetry is a paradoxical thing to be." So it is nothing unusual when Eliot tries to write according to the times and should also lapse occasionally.
He had his ideals knowing very well they could never be achieved. As a classicist, he is the successor of Aristotle though he, in the essay on 'Milton' equated himself with Charles Williams. In the essay "The Function of Criticism" he could not have anticipated himself when he said: "from time to time, every hundred years or so, it is desirable that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature and set the poets and the poems are new order."
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