Hello readers! I write this blog as a part of an activity assigned by Dilip Barad sir, English Department, MKBU. In this blog I am going to write about T.S. Eliot and new criticism and I also discussed one of his essays 'Tradition and Individual Talent'.
Born: 26 September 1888
Died: 4 January 1965
Occupation: Poet, Playwright, Essayist, Critic, Publisher
Literary period: 20th century
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and then the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, as his family was originally from New England. Eliot began courses at Harvard University in 1906, graduating three years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree. At Harvard, he was greatly influenced by professors renowned in poetry, philosophy and literary criticism, and the rest of his literary career would be shaped by all three. After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy.
From 1911 to 1914, Eliot was back at Harvard, where he deepened his knowledge by reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. He finished his advanced degree at Harvard while in Europe, but due to the onset of World War I, he never went back to Harvard to take the final oral exam for his Ph.D. He soon married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and took a job in London, England, as a school teacher. Not long after, he became a bank clerk, a position he would hold until 1925.
New Criticism:
We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds,... for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.
–T.S Eliot
Name given to a style of criticism advocated by a group of academics writing in the first half of the 20th century. Like Formalist critics, New Critics focused their attention on the variety and degree of certain literary devices, specifically metaphor, irony, tension, and paradox. The New Critics emphasized “close reading” as a way to engage with a text, and paid close attention to the interactions between form and meaning. New Criticism assumes that a text is an isolated entity that can be understood through the tools and techniques of close reading. The task of the New Critic is to show the way a reader can take the myriad and apparently discordant elements of a text and reconcile or resolve them into a harmonious, thematic whole. In sum, the objective is to unify the text or rather to recognize the inherent but obscured unity therein. Today, although New Criticism has few champions, in many respects it remains an approach to literature from which other critical modes depart or against which they militate.
The genesis of New Criticism can be found in the early years of the 20th century in the work of the British philosopher I. A. Richards and his student William Empson. Another important figure in the beginnings of New Criticism was the American writer and critic T. S. Eliot. Later practitioners and proponents include John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Reni Wellek, and William Wimsatt. In many ways New Criticism runs in temporal parallel to the American modern period. Eliot inspired and informed the movement of New Criticism. The New Critics resemble Eliot in their close analysis of particular passages and poems.
'Tradition and Individual Talent':
'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood" (1920-22). The essay is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays". This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of the 20th century. The essay is divided into three main sections -
1) The first gives us Eliot’s concept of tradition
2) The second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry
3) In the third part he concludes the debate by saying that the poet’s sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.
1) How would you like to explain Eliot's concept of Tradition? Do you agree with it?
T.S. Eliot is the most influential poet and critic in the Modern Age. He tries to define "tradition" in his revolutionary essay, 'Tradition and Individual Talent'. He thinks that tradition depends on the complete realization of historical sense. Tradition involves a historical sense which enables a poet to perceive the importance of past and present. In the essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Eliot spreads his concept of tradition, which reflects his reaction against romantic subjectivism and emotionalism. He also signifies the importance of the tradition. Tradition, according to Eliot, is that part of living culture inherited from the past and functioning in the formation of the present. According to Eliot tradition is a living culture which is inherited from the past and also has an important function in shaping the present.
Eliot’s view of tradition is not linear but spatial. Eliot does not believe that the past is followed by the presence and succession of a line. Historical sense makes a writer traditional. A man of historical sense feels that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer down to his own day including the literature of his own country forms one continuous literary tradition. Eliot says that in English literature and criticism, the word, 'tradition' is scarcely used. We often apply the word for its absence in order to express our grief. In this respect, Eliot says, "In English writing, we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploying its absence.We cannot make a reference to 'the tradition' or to 'a tradition'. We often employ the adjective form of the word. We say that the poetry of so-and-so is 'traditional' or even 'too traditional.
According to Eliot , if a poet or a writer imbues the element of the past, there is an imitation of the past but he justifies that the imitation is “not the slavish imitation” of the past or the existing work of art before. He argues that the strict blinding of imitation of the past is not tradition and hence “Novelty is better than repetition”. He tries to suggest that a poet does not slavishly imitate the past but there is something new which is born out of that imitation. Hence, there will be a new novelty in the piece of work of art which he implies is “individual talent”.
In addition to this, Eliot suggests that a poet can obtain a “tradition” by understanding the past and he calls it as a “historical sense” which is not merely an imitation of the past but of its presence in the present. It not involves the “pastness of the past but of its presence” and the literary circles of the whole European literature produced from “Homer” to the present and the poet creates his own new work in the present with not just a mere imitation of the past but by understanding the past to obtain the “tradition”. So, Eliot's concept of 'Tradition' is favorable and acceptable.
2) How would you like to explain Eliot's theory of depersonalization? You can explain with the help of chemical reaction in presence of catalyst agent, Platinum.
So3+ H2o— (Platinum) H2So4
In this essay Eliot opposes the Romantic conception by advancing his theory of impersonality in art and opines that the artistic process is a process of depersonalization and that the artist will surrender himself totally to the creative work. He compares the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesized to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions.
Eliot particularly objected to the great Romantics as well as Victorians who exaggerated the need to express human personality and subjective feeling and he says, "The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Eliot holds that the poet and the poem are two separate things and "that the feelings or the emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet." Eliot points out the relation of the poem to its author; and says that the poem has no relation to the poet. There is detached or alienation between the poet and his poem. According to Eliot, the art's emotion is different from personal emotion. A successful artist is he, who can generalize emotion in the reader's one while he himself seemed to be unaffected by any emotion. On the other hand he should be depersonalized in experience he describes in the poem.
Eliot brings the analogy of chemical reaction to explain the process of depersonalization. In this respect he has drawn a scientific analogy. He says that a poet should serve the sold of platinum which makes sulfuric acid. He says, "When the two gaseous oxygen and Sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of Platinum. They form Sulfurous acid. The combination takes place only when the Platinum is present; nevertheless, the newly formed acid contains no trace of Platinum, and the Platinum itself is apparently unaffected and has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of Platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself but also completely separate in his will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates. Eliot also compares the poet's mind to a receptacle in which are stored numberless feelings, emotion, images, phases etc… which remain there in an unorganized and chaotic form till, "all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." Thus poetry is organization rather than inspiration. And the greatness of a poem does not depend upon the greatness or the intensity of the emotions, but upon the intensity of the process of poetic composition.
It is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. He emphasizes the same theory of impersonality in art. The emotion of art is impersonal. It has its life in the poem and not in the history of poets. So, honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. Eliot's theory of depersonalization has been criticized by critics like Ransom and Yvor Winters. So, according to Eliot the poet's biography is not very important but the structure of the poem and its evocative powers are important.
Thanks for visiting my blog!
Words - 1,794
Images - 2
Videos - 1
No comments:
Post a Comment