Assignment on Eliot's concept of tradition and individual talent
Name : Hetal chauhan M.
Roll no.: 13
Paper no.7: Literary Theory and
criticism
Unit no: 4
Enrolment no: 2069108420180008
Class : Sem- 2/ 2018
Email Id: hetalchauhan137@gmail.com
Submitted to: M. K. U. B, Department of
English.
Word count :2416
Eliot's concept of tradition and individual talent:
“From time
to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of
our literature and set the poets and the poems in a new order.”
Eliot
demands, from any critic, ability for judgment and powerful liberty of mind to
identify and to interpret. Eliot planned numerous critical concepts that gained
wide currency and had a broad influence on criticism. ‘Objective co-relative’,
‘Dissociation of sensibility’, ‘Unification of sensibility’, ‘Theory of
Depersonalization’ are few of Eliot’s theories, which becomes ‘cliché’ now. He
emphasizes on ‘a highly developed sense of fact’. He gave new direction and new
tools of criticism. George Watson writes about Eliot:
“Eliot made
English criticism look different, but not in a simple sense. He offered it a
new range of rhetorical possibilities, confirmed it in its increasing contempt
for historical process, and yet reshaped its notion of period by a handful of
brilliant institutions.”
some main
points in T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
T.S Eliot's
essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is very metaphysical in
its concepts; definitions of his main points are only understood within the
context of the quantum metaphysical realm. Some of the main points in T.S.
Eliot's essay are tradition, isolation, knowledge, and catylyst. By "tradition"
Eilot means that all past poets comprise a simultaneous existence and order
into which the new poet or artist is immersed or joined: tradition are those
long historical lines of poets who stretch back through Spenser, Chaucer,
Petrarch, Boccacio and all of them to Homer. This suggests that no poet ever
writes in true isolation--the true meaning of an artist's work--is valued
according to the whole tradition. Eliot suggested that at any given moment the
tradition, the historical whole of past poetic or artisitic work, is complete,
is an organized whole. When a new poem or other work of art is created it is
subsumed by all that have gone before--the organized whole past tradition--and
in being subsumed alters the nature of the whole: Each added piece of a created
work of art or poetry alters and enriches the tradition, which is always an
organized whole.
Eliot
contends that knowledge--upon which inspiration and creation depend and from
which the creative work attains excellence--is the collective wisdom and
experience of all past poets, and the attainment of knowledge by the new poet
is the submersion of self and ego into the collective tradition. Eliot uses
this to state that the mind of the poet or other artist is a catalyst for the
creative process, not the controller of the creative process. A catalyst is the
initiating event that causes a thing--in this case creative art or poetry--to
happen. The mind is a catalyst that stores up impressions until they ripen into
an inspiration for the production of art or poetry. The poet or artist doesn't
express personal self or personal traits, instead the poet or artist expresses
a collective experience or emotion that is based on all the tradition that has
existed before and is descriptive of the human emotion and experience that is
present at the moment of the poem's or art work's creation.
The
Concept of Tradition:
In an age of
academic criticism, it is difficult to imagine the effect that T.S. Eliot’s
early essays had on the study of English literature in universities. [End Page
230] These essays—many of them short, unscholarly in the conventional sense,
and published in periodicals sold on newsstands—redefined the tradition and
established in the still-young discipline of “English” the values (wit, irony,
complexity, ambiguity) which the New Criticism would enshrine and which would
define English studies until the rise of critical theory in the early 1970s.
Eliot’s enthusiasms, notably for the Metaphysicals, helped to shape curricula;
his aversions, including most of the Romantic and Victorian poets, survived his
distaste, but their proponents often seemed vaguely on the defensive.
Late in his
life, Eliot admitted what his own critics had long since figured out—that his
pronouncements were influenced largely by his own needs as a poet and his sense
of what was most useful for the revival of poetry in English when he began to
publish during the Great War. This confession, and his sometimes dismissive
attitude toward his own criticism, did nothing to diminish Eliot’s stature, and
in the last thirty years steadily growing awareness of the complexity and
subtlety of his critical positions has enhanced his reputation and made him the
most analyzed poet-critic in English. We can now see that Eliot’s anti-Romantic
prejudices were more apparent than real and understand some of the ways in
which his poetry and criticism were influenced by the Romantics and Victorians;
we can see how he anticipated much later critical theory, including
deconstruction, and attempted to find a way beyond the impasse of radical
indeterminacy; we can begin to untangle the ways in which Eliot’s philosophical
training, his contemporaries, and the history of his time affected his
formulations.
The idea of
tradition has long been recognized as central both to Eliot’s aesthetics and
his conservative politics, and commentary on Eliot has sometimes come to grief
either by trying to separate art from politics completely or by trying to
subordinate art to politics. These two errors, mechanical applications of
extreme New Critical and Marxist positions without the subtlety of their better
practitioners, are often the result of critical laziness, and one aspect of
that laziness is the failure to acknowledge the broader anterior influences
which shaped both Eliot’s critical and political writings. The Cianci and
Harding collection, which originated in a conference on “Re-Reading T.S.
Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’” at the University of Milan in
2004, is an attempt to recontextualize Eliot’s idea of tradition. Most of the
contributors are not Eliot specialists, and few of the essays refer to any
Eliot criticism that is more than twenty years old. Neither fact is necessarily
a disadvantage: non-specialists can bring fresh perspectives to old issues, and
what is valuable in older criticism [End Page 231] is often subsumed (and often
without acknowledgement) into more recent. But there is a huge Eliot
literature, and many of the scholars here seem unaware even of the most recent
work, a circumstance that results too often in reinventions of the wheel. Any
serious student of Eliot has read about the relation of “impersonality” to
poetic personae; anyone who has examined Eliot’s idea of culture knows that he
opposed an exclusive focus on one nation’s or one language’s literature and
affirmed the importance of pan-European and extra-European influences and
standards; anyone who has engaged with Eliot’s politics at a level deeper than
name-calling knows about the influence of Julien Benda and Charles Maurras.
This
reiteration gives much of the volume an amateur air, a serious problem in a
collection aimed at specialists. There are odd errors of omission as well,
which perhaps derive from the miscellaneous nature of the papers at any
conference, even one with an apparently precise topic. The fourteen articles in
this collection are grouped in four sections which deal with tradition...
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What is T.S.
Eliot's concept of "tradition" and "individual talent" as
put forth in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?
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THANATASSA
eNotes educator| CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
In a sense,
Eliot's tradition resembles what structuralist linguists call
"langue" and the individual talent or piece of writing resembles
"parole." Writers do not invent ex nihilo, as romantics might claim.
Instead, one writes in a language that has evolved over millennia. The genres
in which one writes are often handed down over centuries, as are stylistic
expectations. Even when an artist violates such traditions, such as one might
find in a mock epic, absurdist, or avant-garde work, such breaks are only
meaningful against the background of the traditions against which they rebel.
Tradition
and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in
helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of
Eliot’s writing – indeed, of much modernism – that in order to move forward it
often looks to the past, even more directly and more pointedly than previous
poets had. This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism.
Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s
concept of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to
contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they
inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do. James Joyce
looked back to ancient Greek myth (the story of Odysseus) for his novel set in
modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours
and poets of the Middle Ages. H. D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek
references and ideas. As Eliot puts it, ‘Some one said: “The dead writers are
remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they
are that which we know.’ He goes on to argue that a modern poet should write
with the literature of all previous ages ‘in his bones’, as though Homer and
Shakespeare were his (or her) contemporaries: ‘This historical sense, which is
a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal
T. S. Eliot
2and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer
traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely
conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.’
In short,
knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers both part of that
tradition and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own poetry, for instance,
is simultaneously in the tradition of Homer and Dante and the work of a modern
poet, and it is because of his debt to Homer and Dante that he is both modern
and traditional. If this sounds like a paradox, consider how Shakespeare is
often considered both a ‘timeless’ poet (‘Not of an age, but for all time’, as
his friend Ben Jonson said) whose work is constantly being reinvented, but is
also understood in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political
attitudes. Similarly, in using Dante in his own poetry, Eliot at once makes
Dante ‘modern’ and contemporary, and himself – by association – part of the
wider poetic tradition.
Eliot’s
essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. That is, the poet’s
personality does not matter, as it’s the poetry that s/he produces that is
important. Famously, he observes: ‘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. But, of course, only those who have personality and
emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’
This is more
or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement (in the ‘Preface’ to
Lyrical Ballads in 1800) that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings’. Once again, Eliot sets himself apart from such a Romantic notion of
poetry. This is in keeping with his earlier argument about the importance of
tradition: the poet’s personality does not matter, only how their work responds
to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.
Eliot’s
example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet who wrote The
Odyssey for certain, but we don’t need to. The Odyssey itself is what matters,
not the man (or men – or woman!) who wrote it. Poetry should be timeless and
universal, transcending the circumstances out of which it grew, and
transcending the poet’s own generation and lifetime. (Eliot’s argument raises
an interesting question: can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. by
confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also
be timeless and universal? Evidently it can, as these poets’ works have
outlived the poets who wrote them.)
We might
also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often incorporated part of
themselves into their work – he would do it himself, so that, although it would
be naive to read The Waste Land as being ‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his
first wife, we can nevertheless see aspects of his marriage informing the poem.
And in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Eliot would acknowledge that
the poet of poets, Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the Bard ‘was
occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to
transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange,
something universal and impersonal’. For Eliot, great poets turn personal
experience into impersonal poetry, but this nevertheless means that their
poetry often stems from the personal. It is the poet’s task to transmute
personal feelings into something more universal. Eliot is rather vague about
how a poet is to do this – leaving others to ponder it at length.
Continue to
explore Eliot’s work with our short summary of Eliot’s life, our introduction
to his poem The Waste Land, our exploration of what makes his poem ‘The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ so ground-breaking, and our pick of the best
biographies and critical studies of Eliot. If you’re studying poetry, we
recommend these five helpful guides for the poetry student.
Below is a
short video written and presented by Dr Oliver Tearle of Loughborough
University, which introduces a few of the key themes of Eliot’s most famous
poem, The Waste Land. It explores how Eliot’s poem puts his theory of
‘tradition’ into action through using lines from Shakespeare and classical
antiquity.
Citation:
https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-main-points-eliots-tradition-individual-155721
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/404836
https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/interestingliterature.com/2017/02/21/a-short-analysis-of-t-s-eliots-tradition-and-the-individual-talent/amp/
http://janiriddhi1315.blogspot.com/2014/03/main-concepts-of-tradition-and.html?m=1
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