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    TS Eliot

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    T.S. Eliot was an influential 20th century poet and critic. He believed that poetry should be impersonal and that a poet's work is separate from their personality or emotions. Eliot also coined several important terms in literary criticism, including objective correlative and dissociation of sensibility.

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    TS Eliot

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    ayishashhabazul
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    T.S. Eliot was an influential 20th century poet and critic. He believed that poetry should be impersonal and that a poet's work is separate from their personality or emotions. Eliot also coined several important terms in literary criticism, including objective correlative and dissociation of sensibility.

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    T.S. Eliot was an influential 20th century poet and critic. He believed that poetry should be impersonal and that a poet's work is separate from their personality or emotions. Eliot also coined several important terms in literary criticism, including objective correlative and dissociation of sensibility.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    6 views2 pages

    TS Eliot

    Uploaded by

    ayishashhabazul
    T.S. Eliot was an influential 20th century poet and critic. He believed that poetry should be impersonal and that a poet's work is separate from their personality or emotions. Eliot also coined several important terms in literary criticism, including objective correlative and dissociation of sensibility.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 2

    T. S.

    ELIOT (1885-1965)

    His classicism

    Eliot’s critical work consists mostly of essays and lectures, written or delivered from time to time
    and collected together in book form subsequently.

    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.

    Eliot stands for orderliness in art and in criticism. He believed that the right approach to criticism
    is the 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 altogether which alters the past as much
    as it is altered by it.

    True criticism is the institution of a scientific enquiry into a work of art to see it as it really is. It
    is ‘the disinterested exercise of intelligence’.

    Impersonality of poetry

    One of his remarkable contributions is what he himself calls the ‘impersonal theory of poetry’.
    He holds the view that the poet and the poem are two separate things and ‘that 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.

    The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. If this
    is admitted, there is very little of the purely personal left in him to be transmitted to is work.

    There is no connection between the poet’s personality and the poem. 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
    man, the personality. ‘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.

    Other Concepts

    Objective Correlative

    This phrase occurs in the essay, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’. Eliot explains how emotions are
    transmitted from the mind of the poet to the mind of 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. 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 the past actions is the
    objective correlative of her present agony.

    Dissociation of Sensibility

    This is another phrase made popular by Eliot. This is the typical fault of 17th century poetry
    according to Eliot. It opposite quality is ‘unification of sensibility’ which Eliot says existed in the
    poetry of Donne and the Metaphysicals. 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 is unable to convert itself into feeling, the result is dissociation of
    sensibility—a split between thought and feeling. A poet must have the best ideas to convey but
    they server 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.

    The Value of his criticism

    Eliot’s model critic is Aristotle who had a scientific mind which is wholly devoted to inquiry.
    Eliot calls himself a classicist in literature because he likes to follow the scientific methods of
    Aristotle.

    Eliot does not like the practice of amputating an author by the rules of dead critics. To conform
    merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all. It would not be new, and would
    therefore not be a work of art.

    In life and art, the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is 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.

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