T.S.

Eliots Criticism

T.S. Eliot is a major force in the literary scene of the 20th Century. Eliot defined
criticism as a rational analysis of literature. He is an analytical critic who rejected
impressionistic criticism. He wrote:

Criticism is the disinterested exercise of intelligence any critical essay or not

which produces a fact even of the lowest order about a work of art is a better piece
of work than nine tenths of the most pretentious critical journalism in journals or in
books.

Eliot, like his contemporary I.A. Richards, sought to elevate criticism to the level of
objectivity in science. The critic was expected to dissect the work of art with the
dispassionateness of a Zoologist or a Botanist. This attitude prompted Eliot to reject
both Liberalism and Romanticism. Eliot was influenced by T.E. Hulme who sparked
off an anti-romantic revolution in Poetry. T.E. Hulme, in his essay on Romanticism
and Classicism written in 1913 wrote.

I object even to the best of the romantics.I object to the sloppiness which doesnt
consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or
other.the thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard a
properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all.

Thus, romantic became a term of abuse both for Eliot, and Hulme. Eliots essay
Tradition and Individual talent (1919) is considered as an unofficial manifesto of
this criticism. Eliot begins his essay with a revolutionary redefinition of the concept
of tradition. Tradition does not imply a blind or timid adherence to the practices of
former generations but the possession of a historical sense which involves a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, 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.has a
simultaneous existence wand composes a simultaneous order.

The nation of an ideal order is an influence of idealist philosophical thought. Prior

to Eliot, literary history had been understood as a linear sequence, consisting of a
series of original texts like atoms strung out on the thread of time. The word
tradition comes from the Latin tradition which mean the transmission of teachings,
customs or beliefs from generation to generation.

For Eliot, tradition stands for a value-saturated past, a living organism comprising a
past and present in constant mutual interaction. In the Romantic sense, every
new literary work is original but to Eliot any assertion of originality to the
exclusion of tradition is idiosyncratic, for the newness of a literary work is only
definable in relation to the already existing order of trading. Eliot as a classicist
maintains that the new work must change and conform to tradition. Romanticism
exalts the expression of individual genius but a great work always conforms to the
literature of mankind with its established rules. Eliot thus conceives of tradition not
as the dead remains of the past but as a simultaneous order in which the major
texts of tradition co-exist in an organized manner in the minds of present writers.
This is how Eliot sought to reconcile tradition and individual talent.

In the same essay, he propounds his Impersonality theory of Art by rejecting

subjectivism. Artistic creation for Eliot is a Kind of Kantian disinterested
contemplation. He attacks and rejects Wordsworths formula of poetic creation,
emotion recollected in tranquility as inexact and absurd on the ground that
poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the
expression of personality,

In his essay Functions of Criticism he defines true criticism as a scientific enquiry

into a work or art to see it as it really is. It is the disinterested exercise of
intelligence. The influence of Aristotle is evident here. Criticism is a discipline and
not a go as you please subject. Interpretation and evaluation are its primary take.
The primary function of a critic is to establish benchmarks of taste and excellence.
Like all traditional humanists, Eliot advocate a moral system based on his personal
beliefs. He regards correction of taste as the supreme moral function of criticism.

Two other critical terms of Eliot, objective correlative and dissociation of

sensibility are considered his original contributions to the field of literary studies.
Eliot used the term objective correlative in his essay Hamlet and His Problems in
the Sacred Wood. Eliot explains the necessity of an objective correlative to
effectively express human emotions in a play or a poem. As human emotions
cannot be directly transmitted by a directly transmitted by a dramatist or a poet to
the mind of the reader, a concrete object has to be used to evoke the same emotion
in the reader. It could be a place, a thing or certain repeated actions which serve as
an external equivalent or objective correlatives of human emotions. Eliot wrote:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective
correlative, in other words, a set of subjects, situation, chain of events which shall
be the formula of the particular emotion, such that when the external factsare
given, the emotion is immediately evoked. In Macbeth, Act V, Lady Macbeths
emotional disturbances are conveyed by Shakespeare through the unconscious
repetition of certain actions like sleep-walking, washing of hands which serve as an
objective correlatives or equivalent of her guilty conscience.

The terms dissociation of sensibility is used Eliot in his essay The Metaphysical
Poets in Selected Essays to point out a major fault in the Victorian poets like
Tennyson and browning. The negative characteristic is the dissociation of through
and feeling in their poems. They think, but they do not feel their though as
immediately as the odour of a rose, wrote Eliot. The Poet has to create a
unification of sensibility by which Eliot meant, a direct sensuous apprehension of
though, or a recreation of thought into feelings. This was best achieved by the
metaphysical poets especially as seen in the poetry of Chapman, Marvell and
Donne. When though is transformed into feeling by the telescoping of images good
poetry is produced. But when the poet is unable to present his thoughts as feelings,
a split between though and feeling occurs and the result is bad poetry. It was bread
that had to be healed. Eliot wrote:

A though to Donne was an experience, it modified his sensibility.(But) in the

seventeenth century a disassociation 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.

To conclude, Eliots critical intelligence offered English criticism a new range of

possibilities by his brilliant insights into both the production and evaluation of
literature.