Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual

Talent,” develops Arnold’s canonical

views while extending the anti Romantic
move away from subjective feeling. Bear
in mind that we have moved forward in
time about fifty years from Arnold and
are now discussing twentieth-century
criticism.
A. Eliot replaces the Romantic
emphasis on spontaneity, originality,
and novelty with a new focus on
history, culture, and tradition.
1. Rather than break with the traditions
of the past, great poets carry the past
inside them as a living, timeless tradition
that is ever contemporaneous.
2. They are conscious both of the pastness of
the past and its presentness.
3. They realize that their own poetry only
has full value when it is viewed within the
context of all the poetry that has come before
(the tradition).
4. Indeed they privilege “the mind of
Europe” over their own individual minds,
because their “historical sense” teaches them
that, if they know more than the dead poets,
it is only because the poets are what they
know
B. Eliot alters the expressivist belief
that poetry is self-expression.
1. The poet is not the source of poetry
but a site for the creative process.
2. He is a catalyst that facilitates the
fusion of external emotions without
himself being involved in the emotions
or affected by the fusion.
3. Poetry, that is, is not the expression of a strong
personality (as it was for the Romantics) but the
“continual extinction of personality.”
4. It is an artistic process rather than a subjective
perception: the poet is “a medium and not a
personality” (compare Keats’s negative
capability).
5. The key to that process is not the creation of
new emotions, but a fresh fusion of these
emotions with objects, experiences, and states of
feeling.
C. This artistic fusion (Eliot calls it a
concentration)is expressed in a famous
phrase from the essay “Hamlet and His
Problems”: “objective correlative.”
1. An objective correlative is an external object,
situation, or chain of events that parallels
(correlates to) an internal emotion.
2. Because emotions cannot be perceived by
the senses and are even difficult to express in
language, the poet uses these physical objects
and situations to externalize and concretize a
heretofore internal and abstract emotion.
3. The poet functions as the site of this
fusion of external and internal.

4. In the Iliad, Homer uses several

objective correlatives to capture and
express externally the internal rage of
Achilles. For example, Achilles’ war cry
(Book 18) causes a dozen Trojan soldiers
to fall on their swords in terror.
Thanks for your
cooperation