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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