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Unit 29 : T.S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent ...

“notable for its ambiguities, its logical inconsequence, its pseudo-precisions, its fallaciousness, Notes
and the aplomb of its equivocations and its specious cogency”. He attacks the “falseness” of Eliot’s
doctrine of impersonality, and says that it is designed to eliminate the conception of the artist as
an individual distinguished by his openness to life.
Lack of clarity is another common charge. W.K. Wimsatt says of “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” :
This celebrated early essay, despite its forceful suggestiveness, the smoothness and fullness of its
definition of the poet’s impersonality was a highly ambiguous statement. Therein, no doubt,
consisted something of its pregnancy. In this essay as poet and critic Eliot is saying two things
about three ideas (man, poet and poem) and saying them simultaneously. He is saying that a poet
ought to depersonalize his raw experience, transcend the immediacy of the suffering man. At the
same time, he is saying that the reader ought to read the poem impersonally, as an achieved
expression, not personally, with attendant inquiries into the sufferings, the motives of the man
behind the poem. The idea ‘poet’ as Eliot employs it in this essay is sometimes the antithesis of
’man’ and sometimes the antithesis of ’poem’.
The attempt to minimize the role of the poet’s personality leads to confusion, as two views of the
mind emerge from this essay. The mind is presented as an agent of change, it is an active force
which transmutes experience, Eliot refers to “the mind which creates”. But it is also referred to as
a catalyst, which facilitates change without itself changing. His further statement only confuses
the issue further, when he says, “the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him
will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”
In many places there is a gap between his theoretical formulations and his practical criticism. He
insisted that critics should not indulge in interpretation or judgement : “The critic must not coerce,
and he must not make judgements of worse or better” (The Sacred Wood,). But his best essays,
whether on the metaphysical poets, Marvell or Milton, make clear value judgements. Even the
concept of a tradition implies an hierarchy, for it is the best works which make up the tradition
that Eliot considers so important.
Self-Assessment

1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) The Perfect Critic appeared in ............... .
(ii) The Function of Criticism was published in ............... .
29.4 Summary

• T.S. Eliot’s critical pronouncements stimulated a revaluation of various literary reputations.
He brought about the re-appraisal of metaphysical poetry and sixteenth and seventeenth
century drama. His successful practice as a poet gave special weight to his pronouncement
as a critic. His later prose writing gives more attention to society and culture, and the literary
essays and lectures of the later part of his life tend to be more conventional than his early
work. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” presents a view of the great artist as part of
tradition. Eliot refutes the concept of poetry as an expression of emotion, and lays stress on
its impersonality. He used the phrase “the objective correlative” to describe how emotion
can be represented in literature. “The Metaphysical Poets” presented the concept of a
“dissociation of sensibility”, and declared that “poets in our civilization ... must be difficult”;
these comments shed as much light on Eliot’s own poetry as on the process of literary
creation. His essay, “The Function of Criticism”, discusses the tools, like “comparison and
analysis” which have been used by most New Critics in their analysis of literary texts.

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