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Unit 30: Eliot-Tradition And Individual Talent...

Criticism’ where the focus will shift from author to the text. Eliot here defines the poet’s Notes
responsibility. The poet is not supposed to compose poetry which is full of his personal emotions.
He must subscribe himself to something more valuable, i.e., what others have composed in the
past. Thus, Eliot emphasizes objectivity in poetry. Eliot believes that some sort of ‘physical
distancing’, to use Bullough’s term, is necessary for successful composition. He also mentions that
the poet has to merge his personality with the tradition:”The progress of the artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” The mind of the poet is a medium in which
experiences can enter new combinations. He exemplifies this process as when oxygen and sulphur
dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphuric acid. This
combination takes place only in the presence of platinum, which acts as the catalyst. But the
sulphuric acid shows no trace of platinum, and remains unaffected. The catalyst facilitates the
chemical change, but does not participate in the chemical reaction, and remains unchanged. Eliot
compares the mind of the poet to the shred of platinum, which will “digest and transmute the
passions which are its material”. He suggests the analogy of a catalyst’s role in a chemical process
in a scientific laboratory for this process of depersonalization. Eliot sees the poet’s mind as “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.” He says that
concepts like “sublimity”, “greatness” or “intensity” of emotion are irrelevant. It is not the greatness
of the emotion that matters, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure under which the
artistic process takes place, that is important. In this way he dissociates the notion on the artistic
process from an added emphasis on ‘genius’ and the exceptional mind.
Eliot refutes the idea that poetry is the expression of poet’s personality. Experiences in the life of
the man may have no place in his poems, and vice-versa. The emotions occasioned by events in
the personal life of the poet are not important. What matters is the emotion transmuted into
poetry, the feelings expressed in the poetry. “Emotions which he has never experienced will serve
his turn as well as those familiar to him”. Eliot critiques Wordsworth’s definition of poetry in the
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its
origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.”For Eliot, poetry is not recollection of feeling, “it
is a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences . . . it is a
concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.” Eliot defines that “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.” For him, the emotion of art is impersonal, and the artist can
achieve this impersonality only by and being conscious of the tradition, He is talking about the
poetic tradition and neglects the fact that even the poetic tradition is a complex mixture of written
and oral poetry and the elements that go into them. It was only in his later writings that he
realized that in poetic composition many elements are involved. In his poetic dramas, he sought
to brodent his scope. Eliot has also ignored other traditions that go into social formations. In
‘Religion and Literature’, he has dealt with the non-poetic elements of tradition at length. He kept
on developing his notion of tradition right up to the time he wrote ‘Notes towards a definition on
culture’.
Creative writer has artistic sensibility. He observes the world like any common men. But his vision
observes the world quite differently. He can perceive from life-experience what common man
cannot see at all. This experience and observation get imaginative colours with the help of artistic
sensibility. He creates a world of imaginative reality. His world is more beautiful and artistic than
the real world. He is naturally gifted to create the work which has power to move or transport the
reader. He gets his raw material from the life. He is critic of life.

30.2 Text—Tradition and Individual Talent

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring
its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective

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