Name: Bhatt Vidhi
Roll No: 05
M.A. SEM II
Assignment topic: T.S.Eliot: Tradition and Individual
Submitted to: Dr.Dilip Barad
Bhavnagar University,
Bhavnagar.
Tradition and Individual Talent
Thomas Steams Eliot belongs to the tradition of Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge and Mathew Arnold in being the poet and the critic at the same time. He believes that Criticism and creation are contemporary activities and therefore a good poet can only be a good critic. In his essay ‘The Perfect in the second Wood’ he says, “It is fatuous to say that criticism is for the sake of creation for the sake of criticism”.
T.S .Eliot, in his essay,’ Tradition and Individual Talent’ (1917), he sowed the seeds of a revolution in criticism and in poetry. Modern poetry and modern criticism are really the two sides the same coin; each has nurtured the other. Eliot met the challenges of both the literary radicals and the neo-humanists, who were engaged in the literary discussions at that time, like the latter he put the writer in tradition when he said that no poet, no artist has his complete meaning alone; he must have a sense of history from Homer by which the vitality of past enriches the life of present. He said that sensibility alters from generation to generation, but expression is altered only by a man of genius. He went so far as to say that happens to a nation is as important as the revolution in its languages.
T.S.Eliot is a towering figure in the field of literary criticism. He pleads for the same kind of order in art and critic. Eliot says that ‘critics sometimes give their own opinions where as the function of criticism is to find facts and critics must have some outside norms upon tradition and acquired wisdom’. The word ‘tradition’ is seldom views in literature. But every nation and every race has its own creative and critical turn of mind. According to Eliot, criticism is an inevitable as breathing. So, the fact should be objective and the critic must how “comparison and analysis”. Comparison with the past and modified present tradition. Analyses will show the facts as they are. When we read a book and feel certain emotion about it, we should try to look at our own tendency we praise to poet upon those aspect of his work which he least resembles anyone else means (highly original and work of art). In the process of analyzing the work we try to find out what is individual and what is the peculiar essence (quality) of the man.
The critic gets a sort of satisfaction when he finds a poem completely original and not depending upon his predecessors. According to Eliot, tradition should be positively discouraged because novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much widens significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want to obtain it my great labour than a few things are also involve such as historical sense. Historical sense involves a perception not only the pastness of the past but its present. Historical sense means timeless and temporal when these two things come together makes tradition. It makes the writer conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporary. According to Eliot no poet, no artist of any art is complete in himself. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone you must see him for contrast and comparison among the dead. Eliot sees it as principal of aesthetic, a work of art, a comparison in which two things are measured by each other at that time we cannot say that the new thing is more valuable because it fits in, it’s fitting it is a taste of its value. The poet must be very conscious of the main current. He must be quite awake of the obvious facts that the art never improve, but that material of art is never quite the same. The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past. In short, Eliot says that the poet’s must develop the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop his consciousness throughout his career that is the tradition a in a true sense.
True criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. The first aspect of poetry in the importance of the relation of the poem to after poems by other authors. The second aspect is in the impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. Eliot says that the mind of nature poet differs from that of immature not in connection with valuation of personality, not be more interesting or having to say something more but while being a mere finely a perfecting medium in which special or varied feeling are at liberty to enter into new combinations. The mind of the poet partly or exclusively affect upon the experience of man himself, but the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind that creates.
The effect of a work of an art upon the person who enjoys, it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. The poet’s mind stores numberless feelings images, phrases which remain that until all the particles which can unite to form a new work of art. The intensity of the emotion is not important but the complexity of emotion is important for the greatness of the art. According to Eliot, Great variety is possible in the process of transmulatulation of emotion. For ex: - The combination of the emotion in the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses similarly ode of Keats contains members of feelings. According to Eliot, the poet has not a personality to express but a particular medium and not a personality in which impressions and experiences combine and particular and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important may have no place in poetry and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man’s personality. The feelings and emotions emerging from the poet are different from that in the mind of the poet. Thus the poet and the poem are two different things from the part. So, poet’s personality and his poem have no connection. The poet becomes great because he has more to say and that his mind is receptive enough. The feelings may not be his own but his mind to give a new shape to them. The business of the poem is not to find a new emotion but to use the ordinary ones and to express them into poetry. Eliot says “Poetry is not expression of personality but an escape from personality”. The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind creates.
The emotion of art is impersonal. So, poetry must be objective and detach. So, honest criticism, centers on the poetry and not the poet. Eliot stands for highly organized from of intellectual activity; that is emotions. Eliot says that “the critic must not try to judge a work of art but he must leave it to readers”. True criticism is thus scientific inquiry into a work of art to see as actually in him. Subjective criticism satisfies a critic will. According to Eliot “his work is critical labour”. He selects, rejects and manipulates the details.
Regarding objective creativity Eliot says that “Emotion in poetry is not simply transmitted from poet to the reader but it has to be transformed into concrete to appeal to the reader’s mind”. Symbol also work as objectives as co-relatives. Regarding sensibility Eliot says that poetic sensibility means recreation of thought into feelings According to Eliot “Feeling use symbols”. So, when thought face to the transform into feelings it is a rare poetry and this dissociations of sensitivity.
The critic must have scientific mind. Eliot uses Aristotle’s method of comparison and analysis. Thus, Eliot is a classist in literature. According to him poetry is a superior type of amusement.
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