Themes in The White Tiger

Shabana Khalani

Semester 4

Paper No. 13

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Topic: Themes in The White Tiger

1. Marriage in India

Marriage plays a key role in Indian society as well as the novel. When Balram's cousin becomes engaged, his family “gets screwed” with a large dowry they cannot afford. To save their reputation and the marriage, the family has to take out a loan from the Stork. Balram is forced to drop out of school and work in a teashop to help raise money to pay back the debt – triggering the events of the rest of the story.

His cousin’s wedding is not the only marriage that disrupts Balram’s life. When Pinky Madam leaves for New York, Mr. Ashok sinks into depression. In addition to drinking and womanizing, he finally accepts his family’s dirty business, ferrying bribes for The Stork. Balram joins in his boss’ decline – eventually murdering Mr. Ashok to pocket the bribe himself.

2. The Indian Family

In an interview with The Guardian, Adiga emphasizes the importance of family in Indian society. “If you're rude to your mother in India, it's a crime as bad as stealing would be here,” he explains. For Balram to abandon his family, then, is perhaps his greatest crime. "This is a shameful and dislocating thing for an Indian to do,” Adiga remarks of his protagonist.

Balram also understands the severity of his actions. Fear for his family is the largest obstacle he must overcome to carry out Mr. Ashok’s murder. In the days before, he has visions – imagining a buffalo in the street blaming him for the deaths of his family. Even after he becomes a businessman in Bangalore, he goes to the temple to pray for their spirits.

3. China’s Relationship to India

At the beginning of the novel, Balram mentions to the Premier that China is the only nation he admires besides Afghanistan and Abyssinia. Why? Because he read in a book called Exciting Tales of the Exotic East that these are the only 3 countries never to be ruled by outsiders. He dubs China the “freedom-loving nation,” a place that has never been subject to a master-slave relationship with the West. But although he hears on All India Radio that “you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect,” Balram observes that China does not have entrepreneurs – hence the Premier’s visit to Bangalore.

China, then, becomes a foil to India, which he describes as a nation with “no drinking water, electricity, sewage, public transportation …” but chock full of entrepreneurs. For this reason, Balram tells the Premier his story, believing that China and India are destined to become the next great superpowers. “In 20 years’ time, it will just be us brown and yellow men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world.”

4. Lightness and Darkness

Perhaps Balram’s favorite motif is the duality of “Light” and “Dark.” From the very beginning, he attempts to navigate from his hometown in “The Darkness” to become a member of urban society. Light, then, becomes a multifaceted symbol of time (the future), wealth (lots of it), location (Bangalore), and obligation (none) – while Darkness represents the past, poverty, rural India – and most importantly – loyalty to family and master.

5. Good VS Evil

Since the very beginning of human life,there has been a conflict,a struggle between good and evil.Human beings have this choice ,they can live their life in a good and noble way or in an evil and ignoble way.In the journy of life Man has to choose one path to get get success,too overcome from poverty,to get his/her freedom.

Balram Halwai also hangs between good and evil and his family overcome by the devil.Balram Halwai’s “Macbethian”ambition to live like a king and master leads him to be a cold blooded murderer.His Father has seen the dream that at least his son should live like Man because he was a rickshaw puller who died of tuberculosis.It was his father’d desire that Balram shoul study well in the school and live a better life,the life of human being and not of insects as he himselh has lived.

It is Believed that the rich hates the poor and poor always jealous of the rich till he is poor but when that poor becomes rich,he also star hating the poor and behaves like other rich people.May be it’s a magic of money,that it changes the a person.Balram Halwai,once started earning money,he starts ignoring his family and it’s nedd.In Delhi when he joined Mr.Ashok he was faithful and devoted to his master but in greed of more money and to fulfil his lustful desires,he starts cheating him.The worst I dea came in his mind,when he saw a red Beg full of money.Balram,though was faithful to his maste and respected him like anything,appriciated him for his goodness,nonetheless kills him brutal and blood thirsty.Though he is not just a brutal man,he has certain merits and demerits.He is Grey character who has some flows and often acts immorally.H ehangs between good and evil.After Killing his master,for long time he thinks of money that he has seen in that red Beg.He tried to ignor lookinng at red beg which was blinding form him

“I tried hard not to look at the red beg-it was torture for me…”(244)

His mind kept on thinking about the right and wrong,Fair and unfair.His mind said “Go on,just look at the red beg,Balram that’s not stealing,I s it?And even if you were to steal it,Balram,it wouldn't stealing,(244)

Even while driving the one day,he saw that his driver spit the juice of Pann on the road twice as result two different red puddles formed their on the road,before his eyes,

The left-hand puddle of spit seemed to say:

Your father wanted you to be an honest man

Mr Ashok does not hit you or spit on you,like people did ti your father.

Mr.Ashok pays you well,4,000 rupees a month.He has been raising your salary without your even asking.


Remember what the Buffalo did to his servant's family.Mr.Ashok will ask his father to do the same to your family once you run away.

But the right hand puddle of spit seemed to say:

your father wanted you to be a man

Mr.Ashok made you take the blame when his wife killed that child on the road.

That is a pittance you live in city what do you save?Nothing

The very fact that Mr.Ashok threatens your family makes your blood boil!

So throughout the novel he suffers with this state of mind whether to go with right path where there is no surety of success and which takes long period and the path is full of problems or to choose wrong way which is shortcut to success and richness.

6) Identity:-

The opening chapter also establishes the theme of identity. In particular, the novel explores how identity is malleable enough that one can construct one’s own selfhood. Balram prides himself on being a “ self-taught “ entrepreneur, his transformation from a tea shop worker in the Darkness to a successful businessman in the Light is accomplished wholly through his own incentive. He is drawn towards capitalism because it provides this very potential.

Balram’s determination to take charge of his own identity can be traced through the many names he takes on throughout his life. At first, he is nameless, known simply as “Munna”. Later, he passively accepts the name Balram, which labels him as a “sidekick”, still a subsidiary of another. It is therefore a crucial moment when the inspector dubs him the “White Tiger”, not only because it evoked uniqueness, but also because it distinguished him. He accept this name because it allows him to define himself. As he notes in the chapter, “there will be a forth and fifth name too, but that’s late in the story”. The idea here is that the process of forging his own identity continues over the course of the novel and his life.

7) Globalization:-

The White Tiger takes place in a time in which increased technology has led to world globalization, and India is no exception. In the past decade, India has had one of the fastest booming economies.

Specifically in India has played its role in the plot, since it provides an outlet for Balram to alter his caste. To satisfy Pinky’s want for American culture, Ashok, Pinky, and Balram simply move to Gurgaon instead of back to America. Globalization has assisted in the creation of an American atmosphere in India. Ashok justifies this move by explaining “Today it’s the modernist suburb of Delhi. American Express, Microsoft, all the big American companies have offices there. The main road is full of shopping malls- each mall has a cinema inside! So if Pinky Madam missed America, this was the best place to bring her”.By blackmailing Ram Persad, the other driver, Balram is promoted and drives Ashok and Pinky to their new home.

Ashok is even convinced India is surpassing the USA, “ There are so many more things I could do here than in New York now…….. The eay thimgs are changing in India now, this place is going to be like America in ten years”. Balram is noticing the rapid growth as well. From the beginning of his story he knows that in order to rise above his caste he should become an entrepreneur. Although his taxi service is not an international business, Balram plans to keep up with the pace of globalization and change his trade when need be. “ I’m always a man who sees ‘ tomorrow’ when others see ‘today’”. Balram’s recognition of the increasing competiton resulting from globalization contributes to his corruption.

8) The Cast System:-

The White Tiger is the discussion of the India caste system. The caste system in India is a social system that divides the Indian population into higher and lower social classes. Although said to be disappearing in urban India, the caste system still remains in rural India. A person is born into a caste, and the caste one belongs in determines his or her occupation. Balram gives his own breakdown of the caste system in India, describing that it was “……clean, well-kept orderly zoo”. But no longer because that caste system broke down, and powerful with the big bellies took over anything they could and how there are only two castes in India the haves and the have nots. Balram was born into the Halwai caste, meaning “sweet-maker”, and was the son of a rickshaw puller- not a sweet maker, because someone with power stole his destiny of being a sweet-maker from him.

Adiga brings awareness to the corrupt India caste system by having Balram work the country’s system to get what he wants and to become an entrepreneur by any means necessary, including murdering his boss. Balram educates the Chinese Premier throughout his letters about the corruption and immoral ways of India’s caste system and its economic gap. Although it may seem that Balram’s position in society will forever remain the same, he manages to go from a sweet shop worker, to a personal driver for a rich man, and finally to an owner of a small business.

Balram’s quest to becoming an entrepreneur shows the oppression of the lower caste system and the superiority of the upper caste. He tells the story of how India still has a caste system and political and economic corruption is still present. Balram shows the country of India in which a person high on the caste system can bribe people such as police officers with money to cover up murders, sabotage political opponents by rigging votes and money, and have privileges such as shopping in a mall specifically for those of high social and economic importance. He also shoes the side of India in which those who are born into poverty and low castes may forever remain there and so will their children. Balram is a rare exception, as he experiences both sides of the caste system and manages to move up the social ladder.

9) Freedom:-

Arvind Adiga, he talked about how “The White Tiger” was a book about a man’s quest for freedom. Balram, the protagonist in the novel, worked his way out of his low social caste and overcame the social obstacles that limited his family in the past. Climbing up the social ladder, Balram sheds the weights and limits of his past and overcomes the social obstacles that keep him from living life to the fullest that he can. In the book, Balram talks about how he was in a rooster coop and how he broke free from his coop. The novel is somewhat of a memoir of his journey to finding his freedom in India’s modern day capitalist society. Towards the beginning of the novel, Balram cites a poem from the Muslim poet Iqbal where he talks about slaves and says “They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.” Balram sees himself embodying the poem and being the one who sees the world and takes it as he rises through the ranks of society, and in doing so finding his freedom.

10) Individualism:-

Throughout the book, there are references to how Balram is very different from those back in his home environment. He is referred to as the “white tiger”. A white tiger symbolizes power in East Asian culture. Such as in Vietnam. It is also a symbol for freedom and individuality. Balram is seen as different from those he grew up with. He is the one who got out of the “Darkness” and found his way into the “Light”.

11) Immoral Corruption:-

Balram was born to the low caste in India, meaning that he grew up in very poor living condition. As a child, Balram was seen as being smart. However, growing up, he was exposed into a lot of corruption and immoral behavior, for example the shopkeeper selling his employees’ votes to the Great Socialist during election time. His childhood molded the person he was going to become in the future. Balram ends up doing anything to get himself into a higher caste and into the “Light”. Balram becomes very selfish, evident by his many of his actions being equivocal in nature. This can be seen as both an immoral and moral way to improve oneself, especially if the country as a whole cheats, lies, and is full of deceit. His actions might be justified from the standpoint that anything since he was part of the losing crowd he might as well join the crowd that is winning, also known as “if you can’t beat them join them. “ Finding ways to ensure the competition does not succeed, finding ways to get ahead of everyone else, and coming out on top are all a big part of the world and if you are constantly losing then you might as well play dirty to win. It can be seen as being moral because of the competitive nature of our globalized capitalist economic system. Ina capitalist economy, any way one can ahead is fair game. However, if one is looking at this from a non-personal standpoint, the actions Balram does are very immoral. He cheats people to put himself in a position to gain for himself. Balram does everything in his power for personal gain for himself. Balram does everything in his power for personal gain, even killing his boss.

The Old Man and the Sea and the American dream

Khalani Shabana M.

Topic: The Old Man and the Sea and the American dream 

Paper 10

MKBU

The Old Man and the Sea, Heminagway's most recent novel(1952), is not so much a masterpiece in itself as virtuoso performance, a new demonstration of the novelist's gifts far more than a new development of them. The experience of literature is always comparative; Hemingway's sixth novel has almost the same theme as The undefeated, a story written twenty-five years before,and the old fisherman who has not made a catch for eighty-four days is in the same human situation as the aging matador of that story. Compared with that and other stories, and with the best episodes in Hemingway's previous novels' there is a certain thinness of characterization and situation.

Yet The Old Man and the Sea does give a new definition and meaning to Hemingway's work as a whole. It gives the reader an intensified awareness of how, for Hemingway, the kingdom of heaven, which is within us, is moral stamina alone, and experience, stripped of illusion, is inexhaustible threat. It is completely clear in this novel, as it is not when his characters are expatriates in Europe, that Hemingway's primary sense of existenxe is the essential condition of the pioneer. It is above all the terror and isolation of the pioneer in the forest that Hemingway seeks in his prize fighters, matadors, soldiers, and expatriate sportsmen. The old man's solitude is also meaningful; apart from the brief appearance of the young boy who is devoted to him, sorry for him, and has been told to avoid him, Santiago is the only human being in a narrative more than one hundred pages in length! The giant marlin is sympathetic character for whom the old man develops a centain fondness and the sharks who destroy all but the marlin's skeleton are villains whom he detests: the astonishing faxt remains that one human being is enough to make a genuine narrative. Moreover the old man is not only alone physically, but since he is old he will always be alone. cut off from youth, hope, friendship, love, and all athe other relationships which sustain human beings. Hence, as the old man struggles with the sea-with time, nature, and death-he possesses a singular purity of will and emotion. The completeness of his solitude does much to relate the novel to all of Hemingway's work, making one more aware of how some form of solitude isolated every other leading character, giving a new clarity to Jake barnes' mutilation, Frederick Henry's "separate peace," the soliude which the shell-shocked Nick adams seeks on a fishing trip in Big Two-Hearted River, and the monologue of the dying writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Thus, in a way, the old fisherman is the quintessential hero of Hemingway's fiction. Other human beings are simply absent now, and only the sharks are present to interfere with the naked confrontation of man and nature. It is the solitude which requires absolute courage and complete self-reliance.

With the old fisherman the pattern of Hemingway's fiction has come full circle. The hero as an old man stands in clear relation to the hero as a young boy and Nick adams as a child in indian camp, the first story of Hemingway's first book. Im that story Nick goes with his father, a doctor, to witness the mystery of birth: but he witnesses the horror of death also. The young Indian woman his father has come to help has been in labor for two days. "Daddy, can't you give her something to stop the screaming?" Nick asks his father. The doctor tells his son that despite her outcry the woman wants to be in labor and pain because she wants to have the baby and the baby too wants to be born. Then Dr.Adams performs a Caesarean using a jackknife. Dr.Adams feels exalted as he goes to tell the woman's husband the operation was successfull and finds him dead. His wife's sxreaming has made the Indean kill himself. This is hardly the initiation Dr.Adams had intended for his son. Yet, as father and son row home across the lakr, Nick's reassurance grows as his father replies to his questions about suffering and death. As the sun rises over the lake Nick feels"sure that he qould never die." This sentence illustrated the extreme illusion about existence which is native to the Hemingway hero and which makes disillusion, when it occurs, so astonishing and disastrous.

Just as the borth of a child causes the death of aman in Indian Camp,so in the last chapter of A Farewell to Arms, not only does the birth of a child cause the heroine's death, but before her death when she cries out in her agony, she speaks exactly like Nick Adams: "Can't they give me something?" and Frederick henry says to himself: "She can't die, "Just as Nick was sure that he would not die. When the heroine dies, the burden of the hero's experience of birth, love, and death is characterization of the nature of existence:

So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything. . . You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you . . . They killed you in the end. . . You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

History of 20th Century

Khalani Shabana M.

Topic: History of 20th Century

Paper 9

M.K.B.U.

Little more than half a century separated the end of Queen Victorie's reign from the beginning of Elizabeth II's, Yet in than first fifty year of the twentieth century, The human race moved faster forward and backward-than during perhaps fifty generations in th past. Man's growing mastery of the physical world and its material resources is a story. of ever-accelerating progress accompanied in its later phases by an unprecedented moral and spiritual relapse. Progress and regress, both, are fruits of the sxientific Revoluation which has been the outstanding feature of this century. The perfecting of the internal combustion engine made possible the zeroplane and other means of mass slaughter in two world wars, with nuclear power to follow, bringing the threat of universal destruction, though also possibility of world protection by reason of the nations' saving fear of mutual annibilation.

Hitler Youth and similar political bories elsewhere.It had been accepted that the first dury of students is to study, not to arritate agication being, indeed, the chief source of disablemeat for stury. Political demonstrations by untutored youth mentally untutored.

The Fabian society had been founded in 1884 for the genera dissemination of knowledge as to the opinions, and the social and political changes consequent threon from the first the society attracted authors into it ranks, an though shaw and wells.But the prime movers we animated by sociological and political motives, and literature as su was secondary to these.

Second world war that this is the century of the Common man. Arty Kipps and Mr polly-but mass man that dominated the scene. Greanevertheless became morally and mentally frustrated.widespread i and in some quarters a positive antagonism. art ga 'anti-art', and under the anti-art banner chaotic needed no apology or defence of the new literature james jouce's Ulysses and T.S.Eliot's. The exponents of the new-style criticism based on 'close textual analysis' claimed that their methods were a fulfilment of or an improvement on matthew arnold's principle that literature shoul provide a 'criticism of life', but that phrase remained a phrase, sence the handicap borne by the professional academic scholar is his isolation from 'life' as it is lived by the community at large.

Charles Dickens as a         novelist

MAJOR WORKS :-

The Pickwick Papers
Oliver Twist
A Christmas Carol
David Copperfield
Bleak House
Hard Times
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.

Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens was forced to leave school to work in a factory when his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Although he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. Over his career he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

Dickens sprang to fame with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens went on to improve the character with positive features. His plots were carefully constructed, and Dickens often wove in elements from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in ha'pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

This period came to an abrupt end when financial difficulties forced the family to move to Camden Town in London in 1822. Living beyond his means, John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town. Roylance was "a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman ... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in The Borough. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop

In the early 1840s Dickens showed an interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism. Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story were planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed.

In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1856). It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals which are described in Forster's "Life". During this period he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, and this literary connection pleased him.

Keats concept as a Negative capability

Negative capability describes the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts.  The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability of the individual to perceive, think, and operate beyond any presupposition of a predetermined capacity of the human being. It further captures the rejection of the constraints of any context, and the ability to experience phenomena free from epistemological bounds, as well as to assert one's own will and individuality upon their activity. The term was first used by the Romantic poet John Keats to critique those who sought to categorize all experience and phenomena and turn them into a theory of knowledge. It has recently been appropriated by philosopher and social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger to comment on human nature and to explain how human beings innovate and resist within confining social contexts. The concept has also inspired psychoanalytic practices and twentieth-century art and literary criticism.

John Keats used the term negative capability to describe the artist's receptiveness to the world and its natural marvel, and to reject those who tried to formulate theories or categorical knowledge. In this concept, Keats posited the world and the human to be of infinite depth. Such a position put Keats at the forefront of the Romantic movement, and even at the cusp of modernism, according to some commentators.

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Keats understood Coleridge as searching for a single, higher-order truth or solution to the mysteries of the natural world. He went on to find the same fault in Dilke and Wordsworth. All these poets, he claimed, lacked objectivity and universality in their view of the human condition and the natural world. In each case, Keats found a mind which was a narrow private path, not a "thoroughfare for all thoughts." Lacking for Keats were the central and indispensable qualities requisite for flexibility and openness to the world, or what he referred to as negative capability.

This concept of Negative Capability is precisely a rejection of set philosophies and preconceived systems of nature. He demanded that the poet be receptive rather than searching for fact or reason, and to not seek absolute knowledge of every truth, mystery, or doubt.

Roberto Unger appropriated Keats' term in order to explain resistance to rigid social divisions and hierarchies. For Unger, negative capability is the "denial of whatever in our contexts delivers us over to a fixed scheme of division and hierarchy and to an enforced choice between routine and rebellion." It is thus through negative capability that we can further empower ourselves against social and institutional constraints, and loosen the bonds that entrap us in a certain social station.

An example of negative capability can be seen at work in industrial innovation. In order to create an innovator's advantage and develop new forms of economic enterprise, the modern industrialist could not just become more efficient with surplus extraction based on pre-existing work roles, but rather needed to invent new styles of flexible labor, expertise, and capital management.

This thesis of negative capability addresses the problem of agency in relation to structure. It recognizes the constraints of structure and its molding influence upon the individual, but at the same time finds the individual able to resist, deny, and transcend their context. Unlike other theories of structure and agency, negative capability does not reduce the individual to a simple actor possessing only the dual capacity of compliance or rebellion, but rather sees him as able to partake in a variety of activities of self empowerment.

ODE TO AUTTUM

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

ODE TO A PSYCHE

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Traditional and individual talent T.S.Eliot

Eliot says that the Englishmen have a tendency to insist, when they praise a poet,upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects of his work they try to find out what is individual,What is the peculiar essence of that man. They try to find out the differences of the poet with his contemporaries and predecessors,especially with his immediate predecessors.

They try to find out something that can be separated in order to be enjoyed.

But if we study the poet without bias or prejudice ,we shall often find that not only the best,but the most individual of his work may be those in which the dead poets,his ancestors,assert their immortality forcefully and vigorously.we find that dead poets in the present poets not in their impressionable period of adolescence but in the period of their full maturity. According to Eliot tradition and individual talent go together.

Tradition:”Tradition is a matter of much wider significance.It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.It involves the historical sense.”

This means: “The historical sense involves a perception , not only of the pastness of the past,but of its presence;the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own 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. This historical sense ,Which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is wha makes a write traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time of his contemporaneity.”

“A creative artist ,though he lives in a particular milieu , does not work merely with his own generation in view. He does not take his own age,or the literature of that period only as a separate identity ,but acts with the conviction that in general the whole literature of the continent from the classical age of the Greeks onwards and in particular the literature of hs own country ,is to be take as a harmonious whole.His own creature efforts are not apart from it but a part of it.

       The close relationship and interdependence of the past and the present.” No poet,no artist of any art,has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and arcists. You cannot value him alone;you must set him,for contrast and comparison , among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic , not merely historical , criticism. The necessity that he shall conform ,that he shall cohere is not one-sided; what happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;for order to persist after the supervention of novelty,the whole existing order must be,if ever so slightly, altered;and so the relations,proportions,values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted;and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order,of the form of European,of English literature ,will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered bt the present as much as Sthe present is directed by the past.And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

·      The relationship of a poet’s work to the great works of the past:

“In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judge ,not amputated by them ;not judged to be as good as,or worse or better than ,the dead;and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison,in which two things are measured by each other.To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all;it would not be new,and would therefore not be a work of art .And we do not quite say that the new is more valuavle because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value-a test ,it is true ,which can only be slowly and cautiously applied ,for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity .we say:it appears to conform ;but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.”

·      Literature as a continuity:to be traditional in Eliot’s sense means to be conscious of the main current of art and poetry.The poet must be very conscious of the main current ,which does not at all flow invariably through the mot distinguished reputations.He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves,but that the material of art is never quite the same. He writes:”The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past In a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.”

·      Eliot covers the possible objection that his doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition and that much learning deadens poetic sensibility . He says chat there is a distinction between knowledge and pedantry. “some can absorb knowledge , the more tardy must sweat for it.” Shakespeare acquire more essential histories from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

·      Depersonalization:

He starts the second part of his essay with: “Honest criticism and sensitive  appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”

The artist or the poet adopts the process of depersonalization, which is a “a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice ,a  continual extinction of personality.” There still remain to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to sense of tradition.

Elliot explains this by comparing it to a chemical process- “ The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum ,they form sulphurous acid.This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum  and the platinum  itself is apparently unaffected;

Has remained insert,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,the more perfect the artist ,the more completely separated in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates;the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”

Emotions and feeling: The elements of the experience of the poet are cf two kinds- emotions and feelings. They are elements which entering the presence of the poet’s mind and acting as a catalyst ,go to the making of a work of art.The final effect produced by a work of art may be formed out of several emotions into one ,it may be formed out of a single emotions or out of the feelings invoked in the poet by various words and images.Thus the poet’s mind is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases,images,which remain there until all the particles, which can unite to form a new compound ,are present together.

·      The emotion of Art: “If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination ,and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark.For it is not the “Greatness,: the intensity,of the emotions, the components ,but the intensity of the artistic process , the pressure,so to speak ,under which the fusion takes place,that counts.” He further writes:” The poet has,not a “personality” to express,but a particular medium,which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry,and those which became important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man ,the personality.”

·      It is not in his part personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life,that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting.His particular emotions may be simple ,or crude ,or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact,    of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express;and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new  emotions,but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry ,to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his tirn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently , we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an inextract formula. For it is neither emotion , nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning ,tranquility. It is a concentration ,and a new thing resulting from the concentration , of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry,e=which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal”. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion , 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.

·      Part II:

·      In the last sections of this essay, Eliot says that the poets sense of traditions and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things. Eliot writes: “To divert intrest from the poet to the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: For it would conduse to a juster estimation of actual poetry good and bad.” Finally he end his essay with: “very few know where there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past,unless he is unconscious, not of what is dead. But of what is already living.”

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