NET question Dec-2007: What did Eliot mean by the extinction of personality?
June -2008: What does Eliot mean by the statement that a critic is concerned not with the pastness of the past but also of its presence.
1. 1. Main ideas: Unification of sensibility and dissociation of sensibility:
By ‘Unification of sensibility’, Eliot means ‘a fusion of thought and feeling’, ‘a recreation of thought into feeling’, and ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought’. He argued that the Metaphysical poets, together with the Elizabethan and the Jacobean dramatists, had a mechanism
of sensibility which could accommodate any kind of experience. Eliot points out to Donne's most successful and characteristic effect secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'… This telescoping of images and multiplied associations were characteristic of some of the dramatists of the period Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language. He further states that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age. However, a dissociation of sensibility set in after the age of Donne, in the late 17th century; there was a split between thought and feeling. The influence of Dryden and Milton has been particularly harmful in this respect.
It is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became cruder. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the "Country Churchyard" (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the "Coy Mistress." The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's "Triumph of Life," in the second "Hyperion" there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they were better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability. It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.
1. 2. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in the Sacred Wood.
Tradition: Eliot questions the habit of praising a poet especially for those elements in his work which are most ‘individual’, and differentiate him from others. He argues that the best, even the most individual parts of a poet’s work may be those most alive with the influence of his poetic ancestors. No poet or artist is significant in isolation. The whole of past literature will be ‘in the bones’ of the poet, with the true historic sense which recognizes the presence as well as the ‘pastness’ of the past. Eliot’s sense of the interdependence of present and the past is something which he believed the poet must cultivate. Tradition can be obtained only by those who have a historical sense. This sense of tradition implies a recognition of the continuity of literature, a critical judgment as to which writers of the past continue to be significant in the present, and a knowledge of these writers obtained through painstaking effort. A writer with the sense of tradition is fully conscious of his own generation, of his place in the present but he is also acutely conscious of his relationship with the writers of the past. In short, tradition represents the accumulated wisdom of and experience of the ages and so its knowledge is essential for really great and noble achievements.
The relationship between the past and the present is not one sided; it is a reciprocal relationship. The past directs the present, and is itself modified and altered by the present. When a new work of art is created, if it is really new and original, the whole literary tradition is modified, though ever so slightly.
Meaning of Eliot’s remark that a poet is concerned not only with the pastness of the past but with its presence
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 what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most
acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
The work of a poet in the present must be compared and contrasted with the works of the past, but this judgment is not to determine good or bad. The comparison is made for the purposes of analysis and for forming a better understanding of the new. Moreover this comparison is reciprocal; the past helps to understand the present and the present throws light on the past. It is by comparison alone that we can sift the traditional from individual elements in a given work of art.
Sense of tradition: The sense of tradition does not mean that the poet should try to know the past as a whole, without discrimination. The past must be critically examined and only the significant should be acquired. Neither should a poet be content merely to know the ages and poets he likes. To know the tradition, the poet must judge critically what the main trends are and what are not. The poet must possess the critical gift in ample measure and must understand that the great works of art never lose their significance; there may be refinement but no development.
In brief the sense of tradition means:
a)recognition of the continuity of literature, b) critical judgment as to which writers of the past continue to be significant in the present, c) knowledge of these writers through painstaking effort. Tradition represents the accumulated wisdom and experience of ages and so its knowledge is essential for great and noble achievements.
Eliot anticipates some criticism, and hence he says that it may be pointed out that there have been great poets who were not learned, and that too much learning kills sensibility. However, knowledge does not mean bookish knowledge. He says that it is the duty of every poet to acquire to the best of his ability this knowledge of the past and he must continue so throughout his career. This leads to his concept of :
Impersonality of poetry:
“What happens is 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.”
The poet must continually surrender himself to something which is more valuable than himself, that is tradition. In the beginning, his self, his individuality may assert itself, but as his powers mature there will be a greater extinction of personality. His emotions and passions must be depersonalized, and he must be as objective as a scientist, and understand that his personality is merely a medium. He must forget personal joys and sorrows and devote himself completely in acquiring a sense of tradition. That is why, Eliot says that honest criticism is not directed at the poet but upon the poetry.
In the second part of the essay, Eliot develops the theory of impersonality of poetry. He compares the mind of the poet to a catalytic agent. It is necessary for combination of emotions and experiences to take place, but it itself does not undergo any change during the process. In case of a young and immature poet, his personal emotions and experiences may find some expression in his composition, but the more perfect the poet, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
Eliot rejects romantic subjectivism. He compares the poet’s mind to a receptacle in which there are stored numberless emotions, feelings etc, which remain there in an unorganized and chaotic form till “all such particles unite to form a new compound together.” Poetry is thus organization rather than inspiration. Next, he says the greatness of a poem does not depend upon the intensity of the emotions but upon the intensity of the process of poetic composition.
The emotion of poetry is different from personal emotions of the poet. His personal emotions may be simple or crude but the emotion of his poetry may be complex and refined. He further says that a poet may express emotions which he has never personally experienced.
Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, 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 emotion; it is not the expression of personality, 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.
1. 3. The Function of Criticism:
The function of criticism is the exposition and elucidation of art and also correction of taste, and thereby promoting understanding and enjoyment of art.
A good critic must be impersonal and objective, and must not be guided by his ‘inner voice’, but by authority outside himself. By this he meant tradition. A critic must be learned not only in the literature of his own country but also in the literature of Europe, from Homer to his own day. However, he must not judge the present by the standards of the past, as the requirements of each age are different, and so the canons must change from age to age.
Next, he should have a highly developed ‘sense of fact’. By this, Eliot does not mean biographical or sociological knowledge, but knowledge of the technical details of a poem, its genesis, its setting etc. It is these facts that a critic must use to appreciate a work of art. However, Eliot is against the ‘lemon squeezer’ school of critics.
Practitioners of poetry make the best critics. Such poet critics have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the process of poetic creation, and so they are in the best position to communicate their own understanding to the audience.
Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of a critic. He must compare not to pass judgment but to elucidate the qualities of the work.
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