Eliot’s Theory of Poetry

T. S. Eliot is known as the New Priest of Criticism after Arnold. He declared himself as a classicist in literature and also an anti romantic as he discarded all the features of Romantic movement. As he gave emphasis on objectivity i.e. eliot was more concerned with the poem than the poet. Secondly he views art as an expression. Thirdly he gave importance to the tradition. In his essay Tradition and individual Talent, Eliot asserts :

“In art, as in life, the past and present act and react on each other; so the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”

So Eliot deprecates the practice of amputating an author by the canons of dead critics.

Lastly he views Impersonality as a major source of poem. Thus, Eliot’s criticism was a radical departure from Romantic Aesthetics. There are two types of classicists:

1. Static : Tradition is unchangeable

2. Dynamic : They regard that when the new is added to old, the old needs a change. In this way there is continual assimilation of new to the old.

Eliot is regarded as a Dynamic Classicist.

He says that the right approach to criticism is the classical. ‘Men’, he says, cannot get on without giving allegiance to some thing outside themselves. So the critic has to give himself to some common criterion of rightness.

Vernon Hall writes in this context : The essay Tradition and Individual Talent was written in 1917 to combat the idea that a poet should be praised in proportion to his originality. No poet or artist of any sort can be understood solely in terms of itself( as the Romantic cult of individualism claim) all the existing monuments of literature compose an order, an ideal form. Thus it is that each new piece of work must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.

Again Vernon hall writes about Eliot’s theory of impersonality:

What Eliot is directly attacking is the romantic notion that the poet expresses his personality. The experience that are important for the poet as a man may have no place in his poetry and those that are important in his poetry may have little or nothing to do with his personality.

Thus Wordsworth’s emotions recollected in tranquility cannot be accepted by Eliot, for the latter it is the concentration of a very great number of experiences, rather than emotion or recollection. For Eliot poetry is fusion of emotions or outcome of miseries.

In his last article The Perfect critics, Eliot tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems and suggested the concept of poetry as a living whole. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And he hinted at it by an analogy that of the catalyst. When the two gases oxygen and sulphur are mixed in the presence of the filament of platinum , the newly formed gas sulphur dioxide contains the trace of platinum and the platinum itself is unaffected. So we may say the more perfect is a poet, the less is his own personality involved. His mind forms new combination but he remains separate from that which he creates.

Thus the poet is a medium , a catalyst. The elements which enter in the presence of the transforming catalyst are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. For example Canto XV of Inferno is working up of the emotions though the effect is gained by complexity of details. To say further, life emotion has to be transformed into artistic emotion; as Keats does in Ode to Nightingale. The Ode contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale partly perhaps because of its attractive name and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which Eliot has been struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of soul : for his meaning is that the poet has not a personality to express but a particular medium in which al  the impressions and experiences combine in peculiar  and unexpected ways.

It is not his personal emotion that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotion may be simple, crude or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a vey complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotion in life.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones. Thus it is a conscious exercise. Here we are reminded of Wordsworth’s theory of poetry.eliot says that poetry is a concentration and a new thing resulting from that concentration.

If this is also admitted, it will  be found 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.”

It has “its life in the poem, and not in the history of the poet.”

To confirm the views of Eliot on Impersonal theory of poetry we may say that the emotion of art is impersonal . and the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. The poet lives in a tradition, he must surrender himself to this tradition.

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Old Notes by Prof. M K Chaudhary, Head and Dean arts faculty. 2001-2002 made consulting Text "Tradition and Individual Talent" and books.