T.S. Eliot


An Ideal Critic: His Qualifications and Functions

In a number of critical essays like The Perfect Critic, The Imperfect Critic, The Function of Criticism and The Frontiers of Criticism, Eliot has dealt with the qualifications and functions of a critic. His views in this respect may be summed up as follows:

An Ideal Critic: His Qualifications


1. A good critic must have superior sensibility. He must have greater capacity of receiving impressions and sensations from the work of art he studies.


2. He must also have wide erudition. This would increase his understanding. His mind would be stored with impressions which would be modified and refreshed by each successive impression he receives from the new works he contemplates. In this way would be built up a system of impressions which would enable him to make generalised statements of literary beauty. Such a universalizing or generalising power is essential for an ideal critic, and he can get it only through erudition.


3. A good critic must be entirely impersonal and objective. He must not be guided by the inner voice, but by some authority outside himself. Eliot instances two types of imperfect critics, represented by Arthur Symons and Arnold. Symons is too subjective and impressionistic, while Arnold is too dry, intellectual and abstract. Eliot regards Aristotle as an instance of a perfect critic, for he avoids both these defects. In his hands, criticism approaches the condition of science.


4. A good critic must not be emotional. He must be entirely objective. He must try to discipline his personal prejudices and whims. He must have a highly trained sensibility, and a sense of structural principles, and must not be satisfied with vague, emotional impressions. Critics who supply only vague, emotional impressions, opinions or fancy, as he puts it, are great corruptors of taste.


5. An ideal critic must have a highly developed sense of fact. By a sense of fact, Eliot does not mean biographical or sociological knowledge, but a knowledge of technical details of a poem, its genesis, setting, etc. It is a knowledge of such facts alone which can make criticism concrete as well as objective. It is these facts which a critic must use to bring about an appreciation of a work of art. However, he is against the ‘lemon-squeezer’ school of critics who try to squeeze every drop of meaning out of words and lines.


6. A critic must also have a highly developed sense of tradition. He must be learned not only in the literature of his own country, but in the literature of Europe down from Homer to his own day.


7. Practitioners of poetry make the best critics. The critic and the creative artist should frequently be the same person. Such poet-critics have a thorough knowledge and understanding of the process of poetic creation, and so they are in the best position to communicate their own understanding to their readers.


8. An ideal critic must have a thorough understanding of the language and structure of a poem. He must also have an idea of the music of poetry, for a poet communicates as much through the meaning of words as through their sound.


9. Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of a critic and so a perfect critic must be an expert in the use of these tools. His use of these tools must be subtle and skilful. He must know what and how to compare, and how to analyse. He must compare the writers of the present with those of the past not to pass judgment or determine good or bad, but to elucidate the qualities of the work under criticism. In other words, he must be a man of erudition, for only then can he use his tools effectively.


10. He must not try to judge the present by the standards of the past. The requirements of each age are different, and so the cannons of art must change from age to age. He must be liberal in his outlook, and must be prepared to correct and revise his views from time to time, in the light of new facts.


In short, an ideal critic must combine to a remarkable degree, “sensitiveness, erudition, sense of fact and sense of history, and generalising power.”


The Critic: His Functions


1. The function of a critic is to elucidate works of art. This function he performs through, ‘comparison and analysis’. His function is not to interpret, for interpretation is something subjective and impressionistic. Critics like Coleridge or Goethe, who try to interpret works of art, are great corruptors of the public taste. They supply merely opinion or fancy which is often misleading. The critic should merely place the facts before the readers and thus help them to interpret for themselves. His function is analytical and elucidatory, and not interpretative. “Analysis and comparison, methodically with sensitiveness, intelligence, curiosity, intensity of passion, and infinite knowledge, all these are necessary to the great critic.”


2. The critic must also have correct taste. He must educate the taste of the people. In other words, he must enable them positively to judge what to read most profitably, and negatively what to avoid as worthless and of no significance. He must develop the insight and discrimination of his readers.


3. A critic must promote the enjoyment and understanding of works of art. He must develop both the aesthetic and the intellectual sensibilities of his readers.


4. It is the function of a critic to turn the attention from the poet to his poetry. The emotion of art is impersonal, distinct from the emotion of the poet. The poem is the thing in itself, and it must be judged objectively without any biographical, sociological or historical considerations. By placing before the readers the relevant facts about the poem, the critic emphasises its impersonal nature, and thus promotes correct understanding.


5. Criticism must serve as a handmaid to creation. Criticism is of great importance in the work of creation itself. The poet creates, but the critic in him sifts, combines, corrects and expunges, and thus imparts perfection and finish to what has been created. No great work of art is possible without critical labour.


6. The function of a critic is to find common principles for the pursuit of criticism. To achieve this end, “the critic must control his own whims and prejudices, and co-operate with other critics in the common pursuit of true judgment.” He must co-operate with the critics both of the past and the present. He must also realise that all truths are tentative, and so must be ready to correct and modify his views as fresh facts come to light.


7. The function of a critic is not a judicial one. A critic is not to pass judgment or determine good or bad. His function is to place the simpler kinds of facts before the readers, and thus help them to form their own judgment. He does not supply statements or communicate feeling; he merely starts a process. A critic is a great irritant to thought; he tries to secure the active participation of the readers in the work of criticism.


8. A critic should try to answer two questions: “‘What is poetry?” and “Is this a good poem?” Criticism is both theoretical regarding the nature and function of poetry and the poetic process, and practical concerned with the evaluation of works of art. With this end in view, he should bring the lessons of the past to bear upon the present.


Conclusion: Eliot’s Classicism


In short, Eliot’s conception of a critic and his functions is classical. He insists on a, “highly developed sense of fact”, on objective standards, on a sense of tradition, and rejects the subjectivism of the romantics. The concern for a poem as an objective thing is the special highlight of the classicism of Eliot.

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Hamlet and His problems
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Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Hamlet and His problems

Published in 1919, Hamlet and His Problems may be considered an example of “destructive criticism” in the sense that it challenges the age-old established critical perspectives on a work of art. Eliot puts forward his contention that much of the critical has been devoted to analysing the character of Hamlet, rather than analysing the play, which should be the primary business of the critics. He cites the example of two great minds, Goethe and Coleridge, who also who were not immune to this kind of fallacy and who have substituted “their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s”. Eliot alleges that instead of studying it as a “ work of art”, they have imposed their personalities on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and “made of Hamlet a Werther” and “ of Hamlet a Coleridge” respectively. Eliot, on the other hand, praises J.M. Robertson and Stoll, who, according to him, tried to shift the critical focus of Hamlet to a right direction by pointing out the genesis of Shakespeare’s play from his predecessors: “Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors.” According to Eliot, the presence of anomalies and much of the crude elements of the play can be attributed to this fact.

In order to establish his contentions, Eliot goes on to examine the play from a historical perspective. He cites the example of Kyd’s Hamlet Play and Spanish Tragedy and tries to establish the fact that just as Kyd’s Shakespeare’s play was also made in the tradition of Elizabethan revenge tragedies and was expected to serve the dramatic purpose of this genre. In this Eliot argues that the revenge-motives in the earlier plays are dramatically justified, but in the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet there is a failure in establishing the motive of the character. Eliot thinks,

‘...there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly "blunts" the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the "madness" is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion.’

According to him, Shakespeare made certain changes with the play of Thomas Kyd, but those changes are far from being convincing. Eliot gives some other evidences to establish that Shakespeare adapted his story from Kyd’s lost play. He strong defends Robertson’s view that

‘Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the "intractable" material of the old play.’

Then Eliot goes on to pronounce his notorious judgement on the play: “far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” For, according to him, Shakespeare failed to make proper arrangement of incidents and impose a dramatic order. He points out that the play is the longest and there are superfluous and inconsistent scenes with the versification being variable. Not only this, Eliot presents his assumption that the play must have been written during a period of intense emotional crisis. Even he relates it to another great production art, Mona Lisa and calls the play "Mona Lisa" of literature, thereby creating another controversy.

According to Eliot that the failure of the drama lies not simply with the adaptation, plot construction and versification, but more importantly with the motive of the drama, which Robertson called “the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother”. Eliot thinks that Shakespeare could not handle the "guilt of a mother" so effectively as he “handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus”. Eliot attributes the failure to Shakespeare’s inability to all-pervasive emotion, found in the sonnets, and argues that Hamlet contains certain mysterious elements, which “the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.”

Finally Eliot comes to use a term which would draw the attention of the critical community very soon and goes on to put forward a solution through this. He says that,

‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"... a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.’

He cites the example Macbeth and Othello and tries to show how Shakespeare made use of this successfully, which is, according to him, precisely not the case in Hamlet. Shakespeare could not project any external elements which would fitfully reflect his inner world and could not present external events or elements which would justify his terrible mental anguish. According to Eliot, Hamlet’s case is that of over-reaction. For, “Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her.” (Eliot thinks that “Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.”)

Finally Eliot takes up the case of Hamlet’s Madness and tries to refute conventional view by arguing that Hamlet’s madness “is less than madness and more than feigned”. That is to say, he is neither fully mad nor is always feigning. He tries to establish the second case by pointing out his levity, puns and repetitions of phrase, which point towards a mental disorder. In fine, Eliot assigns the genesis of the drama to an unknown state of mind of the creator and hopes for explorations on the part of the critics to solve “an insoluble puzzle”.

Introduction

Often hailed as the successor to poet-critics such as John Dryden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism informs his poetry just as his experiences as a poet shape his critical work. Though famous for insisting on “objectivity” in art, Eliot’s essays actually map a highly personal set of preoccupations, responses and ideas about specific authors and works of art, as well as formulate more general theories on the connections between poetry, culture and society. Perhaps his best-known essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was first published in 1919 and soon after included in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he then argues that poetry should be essentially “impersonal,” that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself. This view, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary history—not just the immediate past but the distant past and not just the literature of his or her own country but the whole “mind of Europe.”

Eliot’s second point is one of his most famous and contentious. A poet, Eliot maintains, must “self-sacrifice” to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieved, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a mere medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a “mature” poet’s mind works by being a passive “receptacle” of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new “art emotion.” For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of a greater ability to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge. Though Eliot’s belief that “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” sprang from what he viewed as the excesses of Romanticism, many scholars have noted how continuous Eliot’s thought—and the whole of Modernism—is with that of the Romantics’; his “impersonal poet” even has links with John Keats, who proposed a similar figure in “the chameleon poet.” But Eliot’s belief that critical study should be “diverted” from the poet to the poetry shaped the study of poetry for half a century, and while “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has had many detractors, especially those who question Eliot’s insistence on canonical works as standards of greatness, it is difficult to overemphasize the essay’s influence. It has shaped generations of poets, critics and theorists and is a key text in modern literary criticism.

Tradition and Creativity:
T S Eliot "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
Trevor Pateman

Abstract: Exposition and commentary on the key themes of T S Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in which comparisons with structuralist understandings of languages are made and bearing on educational debates discussed.
Who could possibly be against tradition? Well, most important twentieth century artists have at some point thought themselves to be against it. But they have been against different things, and they have not always in practice been against what they said they were against.
Artists have said they have been against tradition when they have been against academicism: the lifeless repetition of motions and motifs no longer rooted in art but the requirements of the classroom for order, predictability and assessability. For the academicism of an early 20th century German art school, see George Grosz, A Small Yes and a Big No. Presumably, only academics are in favour of academicism, though they wouldn't call it that.
More significantly, artists have proclaimed themselves against tradition, meaning the art of the past. But the key difference is between those who have learnt from the past, and need to move beyond it to find new ways of expressing new things and those who, having failed to learn from the past , are doomed either to repeat it or to produce work which, in retrospect, is merely the evidence of a protest movement, as with much of Dada, old and new.
There will often be ambivalence on the part of the creative artist towards the artistic past, especially the recent past. This is understandable. On the one hand, there is the desire to be truly creative, to produce something new and not merely a novelty within well - worn and well - understood forms. On the other, there is the pressing need for genius to learn from genius. The tension produces perfectly researchable anxieties of influence to take the title of a well - known book by Harold Bloom. Some artists can happily enter into and work through an encounter with the art of their predecessors, acknowledging that they are learning and what they are learning from them. Others are anxious lest influence spoil their own individual talent, and they have to deny and repress such influence. Artists will often move more or less uneasily between these two relationships to what has already been created.
In T. S. Eliot's famous 1919 essay, `Tradition and the Individual Talent', acknowledgment of the indispensability of tradition is linked to a (classical) stress on the value of achieving impersonality in art. This is contrasted with a Romantic stress on self - expression (see elsewhere on this website `Classicism and Romanticism'). The poet is someone who excels in having a feeling for words, not one who readily finds words for a feeling. Indeed, for Eliot, poets need make no distinction between emotions they have experienced , and emotions they have not, in fashioning feelings in words. And fashioning feeling in words requires not that one looks inside oneself, examining the phenomenology of subjective experience, but rather that outside oneself one is able to locate an `objective correlative' for an emotion. As Eliot puts it in the other essay of 1919, that on Hamlet, `The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative", in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked'.
This seems to be a particular way of stating a more general view, that one should distinguish between the live expression of an actually occurring emotion (as when I jump for joy) and the repeatable representation of such emotion, as when a dancer is choreographed to jump joyfully. For purposes of art, the important thing is to be able to find such representations which evoke in others feelings appropriate to them. This is rather different from being oneself filled with emotions.
Eliot has an account of how he thinks the artist ought to engage with Tradition - roughly, the Dead Poets' Society. He also has a view as to how a Tradition is constituted in a culture and for an audience. The leading idea here is that a living Tradition is one in which new art can alter the meaning, the perception of the monuments of the past. Eliot puts it like this in a key passage of the Tradition essay:
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order . . . will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
This idea of Eliot's has its roots in German and American Idealism, Hegel and Josiah Royce. But the idea that in a living tradition past and present form a simultaneous order, is most clearly comparable to the structuralist idea that a living language exists for its speakers in a single synchronous state even though it is the product of historically reconstructible (diachronic) processes and practices. In both cases a living tradition is distinguished from a dead one. In the latter case there is no simultaneous order, no synchrony, for any living person, merely historical (archival, philological) records. French is a living language, the simultaneous order of which is being continuously re - shaped by new speakers. Each innovation which takes hold subtly re - inflects the language inherited from the past. It is no paradox to say that for a living language, order and change always co-exist. In contrast, Cornish is a dead language because there are no new speakers to re - shape it. There is no order and no change, just dictionaries and grammars. In this perspective a large part of active arts education must be concerned with keeping alive the past, and that implies deciding what to keep alive and how. For example, in England no one believes that Beowulf can be kept alive in Anglo-Saxon; it has to be translated if it is to have any chance of staying in a simultaneous order (and even then it may be beyond recall). But what of Chaucer and Shakespeare? No sooner do we name these names than familiar disputes recall themselves. The friend of Shakespeare who wants Shakespeare to stay in a living and widely accessible arts tradition will be happy to take on new rewritings and adaptations of the original. The friends of Shakespeare who think that what matters is not any old living tradition but a particular simultaneous order in which it is the language of Shakespeare which matters, will resist. They will find nothing in West Side Story or a comic strip Othello which serves to sustain the tradition as they would wish to define it. One might add that those whose concern is with Christian theology and morality will be happy to see the Bible endlessly retranslated and modernized; those who care for a Church and for the Bible as part of ritual or literature, rather than as revealed truth, will insist on the King James' Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, etc.
The controversies here align to a large extent with the division between the friends of the people (populists) and the friends of the established order (elitists). It is very hard to evade this division and opposition. In the end every teacher has to take a view on whether, say, Shakespeare is important and, if he is, what is essential in him. The only point of serious agreement between populists and elitists appears to be a shared commitment to the idea of a living arts tradition. No one is interested in preserving Shakespeare merely as history, as a sort of archeological curiosity: "This what they did then. Just fancy that!"
There have been those who have said they would dispense with any and all traditions in the interests of self - expression, paralleling in the world of arts education the position of artists who have rejected tradition. Critics like Peter Abbs have argued that the attempt to evade tradition is misguided because ultimately incoherent: without tradition (an inherited language and culture) there is very little, if any, self, and consequently little or nothing to be expressed.
But in an essay which has been sympathetic to the claims of Tradition, it should be said in conclusion that this is not quite the whole story. Consider only that when children begin to draw and paint, they do so in ways which do not derive from the traditions around them. They do so in ways which are invariant across cultures and which draw on the resources of the developing human mind. What is true, however, is that such creative self - expression grinds to a halt unless it can make contact with the traditions which have developed around it. At that point of contact, however, it risks being overwhelmed by the traditions it encounters and coming to a different kind of halt. That is why there is a central place in education for the teacher's tact in managing the encounter between the individual child, as new Talent, and Tradition, as sediment of the talent of the past.

On Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917)

"To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim,” T.S. Eliot declares in his acclaimed essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917). In the essay Eliot reintroduces the notion of the inconspicuous artist―- the old classical interpretation of the artist-as-mirror―- which went out of fashion in the early Romantic period and was replaced with a radically new view that placed the author’s interior life at center. The points made in Eliot’s essay soon became some of the key concepts of the Formalist critics, particularly the New Critics, who advocated a kind of criticism that, to quote Eliot, “is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Eliot later distanced himself from New Criticism, calling it “the lemon-squeezer school of criticism” and referring to their work as “bogus scholarship.” Nevertheless, his influence on their method of analysis, whether intended or not, is palpably evident.

The critic should avoid excessive attention to the poet, Eliot explains, because “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone . . . you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. . . as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.” According to Eliot, facts about the poet’s public or personal life will lead nowhere, since the mind of the tradition is “much more important than his own private mind.” The poet’s task, then, is to become a “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations,” rather than to become the discoverer and expressor of new emotions. The artist’s proper goal, Eliot declares, should be the “continual extinction of personality,” not its development and expression.

If the artist's objective is the dissolution of personality, what then is left to create the art? Addressing this problem, Eliot goes on to clarify what he sees as the distinction between “the man” and “the poet.” Casting doubt on the “theory of the substantial unity of the soul,” he argues that men―- or at least men of artistic inclination―- are divided into two separate and conflicting entities, “man” and “poet.” Since the personality, emotional life, feelings, and so forth of “the man” disappear in the works of the great poets, biographical consideration has no place in assessing the work of art. Though “the man” himself may have a personality, in his art he must either subdue or transform it, in order that he may function only as a medium “in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”

Thus, the task of the poet, Eliot concludes, is ultimately the escape from the self. “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.” In typical Eliot fashion, he ends the section with a concession, perhaps a subtle admission that his argument is a tad polemic and overstated. He concedes that these subjective aspects of “the man,” whose destruction he has here been advocating, are indeed the starting point of art. “But, of course,” he writes, “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
Link 3

T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was first published in The Egoist in September and December of 1919. Its immediate cultural context included several other significant preoccupations with the past: F. T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909), the serial publication of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), and Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto (1918). Appearing in a moment of avant-garde collectivities, of manifestoes announcing decisive breaks with the past, Eliot's essay asserted the present writer as a member of the largest collective of all, the dead. Now bodiless, the dead are present as the living past of literature (and of utterance in general). Like Tzara, and unlike Marinetti, Eliot saw no progress in this history of literature; it doesn't improve, its bodiless corpus only grows and changes. However, its accruing variations, which Tzara trivializes as "uninteresting questions of fashion," are for Eliot the very condition of literary "talent." The "whole of the literature of Europe from Homer" is a polylingual archive constitutive of the present moment and its authors. The "talent" in the essay's title is the ability to recombine the elements of this archive so as to produce a new relation to it, one which complicates all the other extant combinations.
In this sense, literature is much like the alphabet on which it depends—a set of elements whose arbitrary, historical order can be segmented, rearranged, and repeated to produce words and a text from these words. The new work is expressed through them and they through it; they are each other's medium. "Tradition" and "Individual Talent" are synonyms for Eliot, the moments of a reciprocal constitution, two aspects of the same substance. The keyword "medium" is itself an example of this fungibility, deployed several times in the essay in both its senses: it indicates the artist, whose "historical sense" allows her to function as a conduit for the past, and the past itself, the medium or ground in which both the poet and her text are set. The medium is indistinguishable from the artist's mind but is in no way identical to the artist's personality. Eliot figures that mind as a poetic archive, a "receptacle" for storing "feelings, phrases, images" which "remain there" until combined to form a new compound. The experience of language yields more language.
This account of the writer-as-medium obviates the idea of the text as a transcript of personal feelings (hence Eliot's description of art as an "escape from personality"). Feelings are tropes with long histories, shared conventions rather than subjective data, and, considered as form rather than content, are only one formal feature among many (prosody, lexicon, genre, etc.). Instead of the artist's personality, an "art emotion" presents itself as and through the full sonic and semantic relation of the text to all other texts. The artist is the medium for that two-way message and the message is the medium itself, the expression of literature's materials and of the conditions of its production.
The "of" in Eliot's phrase "a consciousness of the past" functions for the essay in much the same way that "medium" does—it's a plenary genitive (rare), which expresses both the subjective and objective senses of the genitive: is this the past's consciousness or a present poet's consciousness of the past? The plenary construction is the answer; there is, for Eliot, very little difference between these forms of belonging—past and present, self and speech, contemporary literature and that which precedes it are "of" each other. Early in the essay, Eliot links criticism to the autonomic, if not involuntary, act of breathing, declaring it "as inevitable." It's important that he links it to the circular, or two-way, process of respiration rather than the transitive expression of voice; for Eliot, an engagement with literature is a process of recirculation (breathing) rather than original production (speaking). Like breath, this engagement happens below the threshold of conscious agency and hence is inevitable, yet, when this engagement happens as poetry (another form of criticism) it can also be described as an "escape from personality." Writing in the presence of the past is, then, an escape into the inevitable, into the constant process of taking in and then recirculating tradition, inhaling and exhaling.
How can escape and its impossibility be simultaneous? The answer lies in another of the essay's famous terms, "the historical sense." We might redescribe this sense as a self-consciousness about an involuntary relationship to the past of cultural utterance. The "great labor" of acquiring this historical sense, which Eliot leaves vague, would be the coming to ever greater, more specific, and more elaborate awareness of one's inevitable retransmission of the archive, and of the archive's similar helplessness not to change as it absorbs new contributions to itself, new arrangements of its previous conventions. Put another way, this historical sense is equivalent to noticing and then taking control of one's respiration, making the involuntary briefly voluntary. It's for this reason that the "historical sense" again marks that oscillation of the plenary genitive—is this the sense of history or the historied sense? Tradition and the individual talent are synonyms because they are both terms for the agency of literary work.
To give the historical sense itself some background, behind both Eliot and Proust stands the phenomenologist Henri Bergson's theory of "la durée" (Eliot had gone to a series of his lectures in 1911). Bergson's description of time as duration, a single indivisible substance, all of which is continuously present, rather than a series of discrete moments, undergirds Proust's idea of "Time Regained" and Eliot's strategic indistinction between artist and archive—the past and present are coterminous features of the Ego when it "lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states."1 Proust's In Search of Lost Time could be summarized as the voluntary epic of involuntary memory, an attempt to investigate and manage the details of unbidden psychic experience, of the past's unscheduled reirruption in the present. For Eliot, whose field in his essay is not a mind but literature, all texts are madeleines.
The Waste Land stands as the ars poetica of this impersonal style: personal "feelings" are deployed in a relentless citational environment such that they assume the quality of quotation, while the quotations move towards the condition of original speech. Of course both tendencies are evident since all writing, even confessional writing, is a matter of recombining word histories, while citations are made new, or different, by entering new contexts. All speech is citation, even if the source is plurally and anonymously authored; literature is the archive's continuous confession of itself. The Waste Land is a confession of that confession, a selective genealogy of the Western canon whose past and present are collaborators requiring one another—Shakespeare's Hamlet is based in Thomas Kyd's lost play and The Spanish Tragedy, Daniel Arnaut speaks Provencal within Dante's Divine Comedy (both of which are cited simultaneously at the end of Eliot's poem, they are each other's textual breath and what the poem breathes—to cite "Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina" is to cite Arnaut, Dante, and Eliot at once).
This impersonal collaboration can even extend into the present "of" The Waste Land, whose set of allusions was made even more selective by Ezra Pound's significant redactions. Unlike reading and writing literature, certain registers of experience in the poem, ones in which the historical sense may not be developed (sex, war, the war of the sexes), lead instead to silence and inert repetition ("Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.") or to unintelligible repetition ("Tereu"). These modes have at least as long a history as literature and also operate by means of a set of conventions, but for Eliot the fact of embodiment as either the subject or object of desire and violence seems less susceptible to self-consciousness, to a voluntary experience of the involuntary, than the supple, reconfigurable body of literature, which is always fertile and much harder to kill. As a body, one is forced to interact only with the rest of the recalcitrant bodies around one in the present; as a poet, the dead, while unavailable to the senses, are the present medium of sense.
Eliot's essay and the example of The Waste Land place his early thought in proximity with recent poetics and their practitioners, from John Ashbery to the loosely associated poetries comprehended under the rubric of Language Poetry. Eliot's emphasis on the difference between feelings and "art emotion" and on the past of literature as its present material are both essentially constructivist tenets. Ashbery's inventory of the present and recent past of language use, a Waste Land of slang and pop culture, and his rapid shifts between subjective centers conspire to defeat the possibility of locating a unitary personality; his ability, or rather the poem's, to forget its subject from line to line is, paradoxically, its method of remembering so many features of American idiom, of producing new interactions among them, of deploying a historical sense that easily takes in both Andrew Marvell and Raymond Roussel. Similarly, Language Poetry's New Sentence, especially when used to reinvigorate autobiography as in Lyn Hejinian's My Life or Ron Silliman's Albany, proceeds by citing and circulating many sources, public and private, whose syllogistic relationship to each other has been deemphasized; the sentences are related by virtue of appearing together on and as the same ground, a signifying ground that can be figured as a life (My Life) or a place (Albany). They are archives of sentences. In both cases, the poem stands not as an escape from personality and psychology, but as the inevitable record of an experience of language and power, of the ongoing textualization of the subject and its dispersion in time and categories. When Hejinian discusses Gertrude Stein she sounds remarkably like Eliot: "the discovery that language is an order of reality itself and not a mediating medium—that it is possible and even likely that one can have a confrontation with a phrase that is as significant as a confrontation with a tree, chair, cone, dog, bishop, piano, vineyard, door, or penny."2 Of course our confrontation here is with "tree," "chair," "cone"; Hejinian's order of reality is one because the archive is not a mediating medium but the material construction of experience. As an earlier incarnation of Eliot (George) put it in Middlemarch: "Our deeds still travel with us from afar / And what we have been makes us what we are." The rhyme between tradition and talent is not always this audible. More often, as T. S. Eliot puts it himself in "The Dry Salvages:" "it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts."

T.S.Eliot as a critic
Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of view of the bulk and quality of his critical writings. His five hundred and odd essays occasionally published as reviews and articles had a far-reaching influence on literary criticism in the country. His criticism was revolutionary which inverted the critical tradition of the whole English speaking work. John Hayward says:
“I cannot think of a critic who has been more widely read and discussed in his own life-time; and not only in English, but in almost every language, except Russian.”
As a critic Eliot has his faults. At times he assumes a hanging-judge attitude and his statements savor of a verdict. Often his criticism is marred by personal and religious prejudices blocking an honest and impartial estimate. Moreover, he does not judge all by the same standards. There is didacticism in his later essays and with the passing of time his critical faculties were increasingly exercised on social problems. Critics have also found fault with his style as too full of doubts, reservations and qualifications.

Still, such faults do not detract Eliot’s greatness as a critic. His criticism has revolutionized the great writers of the past three centuries. His recognition of the greatness of the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century resulted in the Metaphysical revival of the 20th century. The credit for the renewal of interest in the Jacobean dramatists goes to Eliot. He has restored Dryden and other Augustan poets to their due place. His essay on Dante aroused curiosity for the latter middle ages. The novelty of his statements, hidden in sharp phrases, startles and arrests attention. According to Eliot, the end of criticism is to bring readjustment between the old and the new. He says:
“From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order.”
Such critics are rare, for they must possess, besides ability for judgment, powerful liberty of mind to identify and interpret its own values and category of admiration for their generation. John Hayward says:
“Matthew Arnold was such a critic as were Coleridge and Johnson and Dryden before him; and such, in our own day, is Eliot himself.”
Eliot’s criticism offers both reassessment and reaction to earlier writers. He called himself “a classicist in literature”. His vital contribution is the reaction against romanticism and humanism which brought a classical revival in art and criticism. He rejected the romantic view of the individual’s perfectibility, stressed the doctrine of the original sin and exposed the futility of the romantic faith in the “Inner Voice”. Instead of following his ‘inner voice’, a critic must follow objective standards and must conform to tradition. A sense of tradition, respect for order and authority is central to Eliot’s classicism. He sought to correct the excesses of “the abstract and intellectual” school of criticism represented by Arnold. He sought to raise criticism to the level of science. In his objectivity and logical attitude, Eliot most closely resembles Aristotle. A. G. George says:
“Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of poetry is the greatest theory on the nature of the process after Wordsworth’s romantic conception of poetry.”
Poetry was an expression of the emotions and personality for romantics. Wordsworth said that poetry was an overflow of powerful emotions and its origin is in “Emotions recollected in tranquility”. Eliot rejects this view and says that poetry is not an expression of emotion and personality but an escape from them. The poet is only a catalytic agent that fuses varied emotions into new wholes. He distinguishes between the emotions of the poet and the artistic emotion, and points out that the function of criticism is to turn attention from the poet to his poetry.

Eliot’s views on the nature of poetic process are equally revolutionary. According to him, poetry is not inspiration, it is organization. The poet’s mind is like a vessel in which are stored numerous feelings, emotions and experiences. The poetic process fuses these distinct experiences and emotions into new wholes. In “The Metaphysical Poets”, he writes:
“When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary”.
Perfect poetry results when instead of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ there is ‘unification of sensibility’. The emotional and the rational, the creative and the critical, faculties must work in harmony to produce great work of art. Critics stressed that the aim of poetry is to give pleasure or to teach morally. However, for Eliot the greatness of a poem is tested by the order and unity it imposes on the chaotic and disparate experiences of the poet. Wimsatt and Brooks are right in saying:
“Hardly since the 17th century had critical writing in English so resolutely transposed poetic theory from the axis of pleasure versus pain to that of unity versus multiplicity.”
Eliot devised numerous critical concepts that gained wide currency and has a broad influence on criticism. ‘Objective co-relative’, ‘Dissociation of sensibility’, ‘Unification of sensibility’ are few of Eliot clichés hotly debated by critics. His dynamic theory of tradition, of impersonality of poetry, his assertion on ‘a highly developed sense of fact’ tended to impart to literary criticism catholicity and rationalism.

To conclude, Eliot’s influence as a critic has been wide, constant, fruitful and inspiring. He has corrected and educated the taste of his readers and brought about a rethinking regarding the function of poetry and the nature of the poet process. He gave a new direction and new tools of criticism. It is in the re-consideration and revival of English poetry of the past. George Watson writes:
“Eliot made English criticism look different, but not in a simple sense. He offered it a new range of rhetorical possibilities, confirmed it in its increasing contempt for historical processes, and yet reshaped its notion of period by a handful of brilliant institutions.”
His comments on the nature of Poetic Drama and the relation between poetry and drama have done much to bring about a revival of Poetic Drama in the modern age. Even if he had written no poetry, he would have made his mark as a distinguished and subtle critic.

T.S. Eliot as a critic

Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of view of the bulk and quality of his critical writings. His five hundred and odd essays occasionally published as reviews and articles had a far-reaching influence on literary criticism in the country. His criticism was revolutionary which inverted the critical tradition of the whole English speaking work. John Hayward says:

“I cannot think of a critic who has been more widely read and discussed in his own life-time; and not only in English, but in almost every language, except Russian.”

As a critic Eliot has his faults. At times he assumes a hanging-judge attitude and his statements savor of a verdict. Often his criticism is marred by personal and religious prejudices blocking an honest and impartial estimate. Moreover, he does not judge all by the same standards. There is didacticism in his later essays and with the passing of time his critical faculties were increasingly exercised on social problems. Critics have also found fault with his style as too full of doubts, reservations and qualifications.

Still, such faults do not detract Eliot’s greatness as a critic. His criticism has revolutionized the great writers of the past three centuries. His recognition of the greatness of the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century resulted in the Metaphysical revival of the 20th century. The credit for the renewal of interest in the Jacobean dramatists goes to Eliot. He has restored Dryden and other Augustan poets to their due place. His essay on Dante aroused curiosity for the latter middle ages. The novelty of his statements, hidden in sharp phrases, startles and arrests attention. According to Eliot, the end of criticism is to bring readjustment between the old and the new. He says:

“From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order.”

Such critics are rare, for they must possess, besides ability for judgment, powerful liberty of mind to identify and interpret its own values and category of admiration for their generation. John Hayward says:

“Matthew Arnold was such a critic as were Coleridge and Johnson and Dryden before him; and such, in our own day, is Eliot himself.”

Eliot’s criticism offers both reassessment and reaction to earlier writers. He called himself “a classicist in literature”. His vital contribution is the reaction against romanticism and humanism which brought a classical revival in art and criticism. He rejected the romantic view of the individual’s perfectibility, stressed the doctrine of the original sin and exposed the futility of the romantic faith in the “Inner Voice”. Instead of following his ‘inner voice’, a critic must follow objective standards and must conform to tradition. A sense of tradition, respect for order and authority is central to Eliot’s classicism. He sought to correct the excesses of “the abstract and intellectual” school of criticism represented by Arnold. He sought to raise criticism to the level of science. In his objectivity and logical attitude, Eliot most closely resembles Aristotle. A. G. George says:

“Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of poetry is the greatest theory on the nature of the process after Wordsworth’s romantic conception of poetry.”

Poetry was an expression of the emotions and personality for romantics. Wordsworth said that poetry was an overflow of powerful emotions and its origin is in “Emotions recollected in tranquility”. Eliot rejects this view and says that poetry is not an expression of emotion and personality but an escape from them. The poet is only a catalytic agent that fuses varied emotions into new wholes. He distinguishes between the emotions of the poet and the artistic emotion, and points out that the function of criticism is to turn attention from the poet to his poetry.

Eliot’s views on the nature of poetic process are equally revolutionary. According to him, poetry is not inspiration, it is organization. The poet’s mind is like a vessel in which are stored numerous feelings, emotions and experiences. The poetic process fuses these distinct experiences and emotions into new wholes. In “The Metaphysical Poets”, he writes:

“When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary”.

Perfect poetry results when instead of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ there is ‘unification of sensibility’. The emotional and the rational, the creative and the critical, faculties must work in harmony to produce great work of art. Critics stressed that the aim of poetry is to give pleasure or to teach morally. However, for Eliot the greatness of a poem is tested by the order and unity it imposes on the chaotic and disparate experiences of the poet. Wimsatt and Brooks are right in saying:

“Hardly since the 17th century had critical writing in English so resolutely transposed poetic theory from the axis of pleasure versus pain to that of unity versus multiplicity.”

Eliot devised numerous critical concepts that gained wide currency and has a broad influence on criticism. ‘Objective co-relative’, ‘Dissociation of sensibility’, ‘Unification of sensibility’ are few of Eliot clichés hotly debated by critics. His dynamic theory of tradition, of impersonality of poetry, his assertion on ‘a highly developed sense of fact’ tended to impart to literary criticism catholicity and rationalism.

To conclude, Eliot’s influence as a critic has been wide, constant, fruitful and inspiring. He has corrected and educated the taste of his readers and brought about a rethinking regarding the function of poetry and the nature of the poet process. He gave a new direction and new tools of criticism. It is in the re-consideration and revival of English poetry of the past. George Watson writes:

“Eliot made English criticism look different, but not in a simple sense. He offered it a new range of rhetorical possibilities, confirmed it in its increasing contempt for historical processes, and yet reshaped its notion of period by a handful of brilliant institutions.”

His comments on the nature of Poetic Drama and the relation between poetry and drama have done much to bring about a revival of Poetic Drama in the modern age. Even if he had written no poetry, he would have made his mark as a distinguished and subtle critic.