T.S.

ELIOT

General presentation

His activity as a critic may be discussed under three headings:

1. The first: his judgements upon English writers, which had a great influence upon
the taste of his time;
2. The second: the conception upon the work of art: here we have to mention some
of his major concepts: “impersonal poetry”, “the objective correlative”, his
justification of “tradition”;
3. The third: the function of criticism, set on a rational basis.

The bulk of his critical work is impressive. In the 20s and 30s he published the following
works: The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920); Homage to John
Dryden (1924); For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order (1928); The use of
Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). This is a partial list. In his later works Eliot
focused on culture and civilization in general. See Notes towards the definition of Culture
(1948).

Eliot’s critical pronouncements

Eliot’s influence on the literary taste of his time was conspicuous: he did more than
anybody else to promote the shift of sensibility at the beginning of our century and to
revaluate the major periods in the history of English poetry. On the one hand, he reacted
most strongly against romanticism, he criticized Milton ( a XVIIth century classical
poet). On the other hand he exalted Dante and the Jacobean dramatists (Thomas
Middleton, Thomas Heywood, Cyril Tourneur). Also, he focused on the seventeenth
century metaphysical poets – John Donne is an example of a ‘forgotten’ metaphysical
poet.

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In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, he invented a phrase which was to become
famous among literary critics. He referred to the “mechanism of sensibility” of the
metaphysical poets. This “mechanism of sensibility” allowed them to think and feel at the
same time, or to turn the rational process into an emotional one. In fact, they managed to
annihilate the barrier between thinking and feeling. This process was called by Eliot
“unified sensibility”, or “felt thought.”
The metaphysical poets were John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell. Why are
they so important for Eliot and for modernism?

In order to understand this, we need to put things into perspective. In the history of
English poetry, until the triumph of the rationalist spirit of the XVIII th century, poets
thought and felt or, in other words, the expression of feelings and intellectual meditation
were combined. After the triumph of scientific rationalism, poets either thought, as they
did in the XVIIIth century, or with the romantic reaction, they only felt.
Therefore, in Eliot’s history of English poetry, the XVIII th century and the romantic age
appear as ages of disintegration, dissociation into intellect and feeling.
The modern poets were the ones who attempted to restore the original unity: the French
symbolists, Eliot himself, Ezra Pound and others. The roots of modern poetry are to be
found in the metaphysical poetry of the XVIIth century.
Drawing a parallel of structural analogy between metaphysical poetry and modern
poetry, Eliot says:
“We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present,
must be difficult. 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 dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”

2.5. Eliot’s conception upon the work of art

Related to his view on the history of English poetry is his conception upon the work of
art. Eliot’s impersonal theory is widely known, and played a major role in modern

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criticism. He considers that the work of art is located “somewhere between the reader and
the writer; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to
express”, or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader.

Poetry thus is not an expression of feelings, it might be the representation of something

quite remote from the poet’s personal experiences. And we should quote the famous
passage:
“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.” (“Tradition and the Individual
Talent”).

The source of poetry is, with Eliot, the “immediate experience” (F. H. Bradley)
(experienta nemediata), which precedes any division of subject and object, and hence any
personal emotion. Eliot replaces the term “immediate experience” with feeling or
sensibility. The poet becomes the man/woman who returns to the original immediate
experience, to a unified sensibility by objectifying his/her feeling.
Eliot sees the work of art as a symbolic world which can be analysed and judged. He
found the term “objective correlative” for this symbolic world. The term is used in the
essay “Hamlet” written in 1919.
The term means the right kind of situation, the right plot, or a set of symbolic objects in a
play or in a novel which motivates the emotion of the characters in the play or novel.

How concretely is this objective construct analyzable?

Eliot thinks of the work of poetry as language, first of all. Eliot said many times:
“Literature must be judged by language, it is the duty of the poet to develop language.”
He even spoke of the “music of poetry”, seen as a pattern of sounds that bears meaning in
itself.
He referred to the unity, in modern poetry, between form and meaning, image and idea,
which mirrors the unity between thought and feeling that I mentioned earlier.
All this leads to Eliot’s concept of history, development and the poet’s relation to it.

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Eliot has a double standard, a double conception of time. On the one hand, he recognizes
the necessities of a time and often judges works of literature according to the contribution
to the ‘progress’ of language and poetry, and on the other hand he affirms an eternal
standard. In the famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot defines this
interplay memorably.
What Eliot means by “historical sense” is not what has been traditionally called so. He
rejects historical determination, but he rather understands that the absolute is in the
relative. Eliot wants the critic to see literature “not as consecrated by time, but to see it
beyond time; to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred
years ago with the same eyes.”

Instead of reading the metaphysical poets placing himself in the context of origin, Eliot
draws those poet closer to him and to his taste, he revaluates them according to the
criteria of the present.

2.6. The conception upon criticism

Eliot distinguishes between three types of criticism:

- creative criticism;
- historical and moralistic criticism – represented by Sainte-Beuve;
- criticism proper, poetic criticism.

The first Eliot considered that “it simply does not count”, the second is really not literary
criticism at all – Sainte-Beuve should be called historian, philosopher or moralist. Thus,
the only genuine criticism is that of the poet-critic, who is “criticizing poetry in order to
create poetry”.