Page 312 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 29 : T.S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent:
Introduction and Detailed Study

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
29.1 “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
29.2 “The Function of Criticism”
29.3 The Achievement of T.S. Eliot as a Critic
29.4 Summary
29.5 Key-Words
29.6 Review Questions
29.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to :
• Discuss “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, the most influential essay Eliot wrote, and
“The Function of Criticism” where he talks about the tools of the critic.
• Evaluate his achievement as a critic, and try to gauge his influence on later critics.

Introduction

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is probably the best known and most influential English poet of
the twentieth century. His work as a critic is equally significant. He was born in St Louis, Missouri;
his parents belonged to New England, from a section of society which has been called WASP :
White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, that is, part of the mainstream of society which colonized the
eastern coast of America. He joined Harvard University in 1906, obtained his M.A. in 1911, and
started work on a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. In 1912 he was appointed an
assistant at Harvard, but he was already under the influence of the symbolists, and had started
writing poems in the manner of Jules Laforgue. He spent one year (1910-11) in Paris, and in 1914
he joined Merton College, Oxford. He settled in London, and became a member of the Anglican
church and a British citizen in 1927, preferring to renounce his American heritage. He left academic
pursuits to earn a living, working first in a bank, later as an editor with the publishing firm of
Faber and Faber. In 1922 he founded The Criterion, a cultural quarterly, and The Waste Land was
published in the inaugural issue. In 1924 he published Homage to John Dryden, which contained
studies of Dryden and the metaphysical poets. This was followed by For Lancelot Andrews : Essays
on Style and Order (1928) in which he announced himself to be “classicist in literature, royalist in
politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” His major books of criticism include The Sacred Wood
(1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
(1949) and On Poetry and Poets (1957). I am sure you are already familiar with his achievements as
a poet and dramatist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
T.S. Eliot’s critical output was quite diverse; he wrote theoretical pieces as well as studies of
particular authors. In “To Criticize the Critic”, a lecture delivered at Leeds University in 1961,
Eliot divided his prose writings into three periods. During the first, he was writing for journals

306 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY