T.S.
ELIOT 1888-1965
National Portrait Gallery
Biographical details
• Thomas Stearns Eliot
• a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and
editor
• one of 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in
English-language Modernist poetry.
Biographical details--continued
• In 1915, Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which was seen as a
masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by
some of the best-known poems in English language,
including “The Waste Land” (1932), “The Hollow Men”
(1925), and “Ash Wednesday” (1930).
Biographical details--continued
• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948--“for his outstanding,
pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”
• Eliot’s plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family
Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential
Clerk (1954), and TheElderStatesman(1959)
The twentieth century Literary Criticism
• Background
• The twentieth century is an age of interrogation because it
challenged many ‘accepted’ notions of society everywhere.
In Britain, the century marked a revolt against Victorian
ideals.
• Victorian attitude towards life as one of acceptance of
authority. Neither science nor democracy could completely
shake the people’s faith in literature. The church was still the
authority in religion, the employer in the industry, the parent
at home, and the romantic tradition in literature.
Victorian cruelty—Dickens in Oliver Twist-
homeless and hungry
• During the last decade of Victorianism, 'the cherished ideals of the
age' were openly questioned. George Bernard Shaw was among the
first writers of the century to doubt the 'accepted' values of the
Victorian Age.
The Aesthetic & Moralistic Tradition
• ‘Art for Art’s sake’ (aestheticism) was the prominent creed when the
Victorian age ended with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.
• Aestheticism characterized by the ‘romantic pleasure principle’ in
literature. Literary criticism/appreciation became ‘the adventure of a
soul among masterpieces’. The critic’s task was to talk about himself,
with reference, to an author—how he felt in that company. Thiswas
the stand of critics like George Saintsbury, Arthur Quiller-Couch, and
Edmund Gosse.
• Walter Pater’s true successor was Arthur Symons. Of the same sort,
though later in date, were the critics of the Bloomsbury group,
notably Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. Their judgment was by
‘taste’ rather than any definable critical principle. Literary criticism
degenerated into a chat over a cup of tea.
Analytical critics
• The analytical critics were dissatisfied with the vagueness of
impressionistic criticism (practised by George Saintsbury, Arthur
Quiller-Couch, Edmund Gosse, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and
many other minor critics of the age).
• T. S. Eliot was an analytical critic who instituted a scientific inquiry
into the creative process to account for the effect of a work. As this
was the method followed by Aristotle, he called himself a classicist.
The Psychological critics
• The psychological critics followed either Freud, the famous Austrian
psychoanalyst, or I.A. Richards. Freud considered art as the
expression of the artist’s subconscious self. The stream-of-
consciousness technique exemplified in the works of James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson belongs to this period.
The Sociological critics
• The sociological criticism of F. W. Bateson and John F. Danby is
another trend of this period. Christopher Caudwell, another
sociological critic, popularized the Marxist approach.
• Thus this age saw many diversifications in the area of literary
criticism. The number of ways in which the problem of criticism was
approached was never before so great or so confusing.
II. T.S. Eliot --Eliot’s classicism
• Eliot’s critical work consists of essays and lectures, written or
delivered from time to time and subsequently collected
together in book form.
• The most important among them are--The Sacred Wood,
Homage to John Dryden, For Lancelot Andrews, Selected
Essays, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,
Elizabethan Essays, and Essays Ancient and Modern.
T.S. Eliot --Eliot’s classicism--continued
• Eliot stands for orderliness in art and criticism. He believed
that the right approach to criticism is classical. Criticism is
about something other than itself. He dislikes the abstract
form of criticism. A precept given by Horace or Boileau is
simply an unfinished analysis. For a work to conform to it
blindly is to ignore the call of the present. The present alters
the past as much as altered by it.
• True criticism is the institution of a scientific enquiry into a
work of art to see it as it is. It is ‘the disinterested exercise of
intelligence’.
Impersonal theory of poetry
• One of Eliot's remarkable contributions is what he himself
calls the ‘impersonal theory of poetry’. Eliot says that the
poet and the poem are two separate things, and 'the feeling,
or emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something
different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of
the poet'.
• The past is never dead; the past is always present in a poet. If
we approach a poet with an open mind, we shall often find
that not only the best but the most individual parts of his
work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors,
assert their immortality most vigorously.
Impersonal theory of poetry--continued
• 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality'. There is very little of the
purely personal left in him to be transmitted to his
work. There is no connection between the personality and
the poem.
Impersonal theory of poetry--continued
• 'The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in
him will be the man who suffers and the mind which
creates….Impressions and experiences which are important
for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those
which become important in the poetry may play quite a
negligible part in the personality.
Impersonal theory of poetry--continued
• 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. The emotion of art is impersonal.
Objective Correlative
• This phrase occurs in the essay, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’. Eliot
explains how emotions get transmitted from the poet to the reader.
• 'It has to turn itself into something concrete—a picture or a person,
pace, or thing suggestive of it— to evoke the same emotion in the
reader'.
Objective Correlative--continued
• The object in which emotion is thus bodied is objective correlative
(equivalent). In the sleep-walking scene, Lady Macbeth repeats all the
actions she has done immediately after the murder of Duncan. This
unconscious repetition of past actions is the objective correlative of
her present agony.
The sleep-walking scene
The sleep-walking scene--continued
Dissociation of Sensibility
• Here we get another phrase popularized by Eliot.
• Eliot points out that the dissociation of sensibility is the
typical fault of 17th-century English poetry. Unification of
sensibility existed in the poetry of Donne and the
Metaphysicals.
Dissociation of Sensibility--continued
• In the poetry of Donne, thought is transformed into feeling
to steal its way into the reader’s heart. It is the union of the
two that constitutes poetic sensibility.
• When the poet’s thought fails to convert itself into feeling,
the result is the dissociation of sensibility—a split between
thought and feeling.
Dissociation of Sensibility--continued
• A poet must have the best ideas to convey, but they serve
no purpose unless they issue forth as feelings. Tennyson and
Browning, says Eliot, fail to satisfy this test: ‘they think, but
they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour
of a rose.
Odour of a rose.
The Value of his criticism
• Eliot’s model critic is Aristotle, who had a scientific mind totally
devoted to inquiry. Eliot calls himself a classicist in literature
because he likes to follow the scientific methods of Aristotle.
• Eliot does not like to examine an author by the rules of dead
critics. To conform merely would be for the new work, not to
conform at all. It would not be new and (therefore) not a work of
art.
The Value of his criticism--continued
• In life and art, the past gets altered by the present. The
present finds directed by the past'.
Eliot considers poetry as a form of superior amusement.
• As a classicist, Eliot applies the method of science to the
study of literature, and this is his contribution to present-day
criticism.