Eliot Criticism

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

• Part One
  • Context: English crit doesn’t have recourse to any real “tradition,” but will use it to “censure” (so and so is too traditional)
    • wants to find a positive place for tradition; not saying that literature has to “get better” than the past to be worthwhile
    • for most Britons, only good if you mean it in “science of archaeology” sense
      • neat Eliot is defining his tradition opposite of a scientific one, but later he says artist in depersonalization approaches condition of science
    • wants to encourage English lit’s sense of criticism, its tendency to critique
  • Present Type of Criticism: Individualist
    • “our tendency to insist…upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else….we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed”
  • His Revision
    • “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”
  • Tradition Isn’t Blind Mimicry
    • “blind or timid adherence to its successors…should positively be discouraged”
  • Characteristics of Tradition
    • “cannot be inherited” but “obtain it with great labour”
    • “historical sense:” “indispensable” for people who want to keep producing after their young adulthood
      • “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence….not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature” of Europe and your particular country “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order”
      • sim. to Forster
      • “a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal…together” = traditional writer, who is therefore “acutely conscious of his place in time”
  • “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”
    • “You must set him…among the dead” even just to understand poet’s aesthetics
    • This comparison “not one-sided” but instead “past altered by the present”
      • “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new”
      • “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 the conformity between the old and the new”
  • Poets thus “judged by the standards of the past” not in terms of being better or worse (esp b/c art “never improves” over time)
    • But instead because the way they do or don’t “fit in” the order will judge their value
  • We can’t tell what is truly individual and what is conformity, but most at will have both
  • Poet can’t play favorites
    • Can’t model self after “one preferred period” or a few poets OR “take the past as a lump…indiscriminate”
  • “the material of art is never quite the same”
    • as the “mind of Europe” changes, the old art doesn’t get “Superannuated” but a “development, a refinement”
    • how does this change occur? he says that he’s not inclined to accept a psychological point of view of improvement, and then speculates maybe it’s “based on a complication in economics and machinery”...but he avoids determinism b/c he says that the present has one up on the past: consciousness
  • not about the individual but more about “the mind of his own country” or of Europe
    • “continual surrender of himself…to something which is more valuable…continual extinction of personality”
    • in this depersonalization, art “may be said to approach the condition of science”
      • his science example is one of chemical reaction rather than archaeology: instead of digging up something as is, you have a reaction of past and present
  • is it pedantry/erudition?
    • he says he doesn’t mean learning in the same way as putting knowledge “in a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or…publicity” but rather it’s the consciousness of the past is what matters: you need it and need to develop it
• Part Two
  • “poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written”
  • he refers to his “Impersonality theory of poetry”
    • instead of being a more unique person, you make yourself “a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.”
    • poet’s mind should be left unchanged, merely a catalyst: “separate” dual personality: “the man who suffers” diff from “man who creates”
      • so the whole experience of an individual is like the laboratory
    • the individual “Collects” emotions, feelings, images, phrases until they form a “new compound”
  • emotion of poetry not same thing as what’s felt of human emotions: there is an intensity that belongs to the poetic process itself, which is the “pressure” under which poetry is made:
    • that’s what makes poetry great
  • his Enemy: “the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul:”
    • “poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium…in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways”
      • seems to me like art is sounding like the resolution of fragmented life
  • So, for Eliot the great method is COMBINATION
    • where lots of different feelings come together, combining with a particular emotion, which “gives us a new art emotion”
    • what kinds of emotions? not autobiographical, not “new” emotions (only lead to perversion he says), but rather “use the ordinary ones” and by putting them into poetry “to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all”
    • why? it gives a “concentration, of a very great number of experiences” which leads to the creation of something new
  • “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality”
    • and then he admits that only people who want an escape are the people who have emotions and personalities! there is some intention in the motivation of writing
• Part Three
  • consider poetry, not the poet
  • have to be able to figure out when poet expresses “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet”
  • art emotion: impersonal; how? by “surrendering” yourself to the poem
  • must live “not merely the present, but the present moment of the past”

“The Metaphysical Poets,” (1921)

• Dissociation of sensibility
  • 17th c metaphysical poet ie Donne: intellectual thought not separated from emotion, but all are circulating together
    • “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”
    • Donne united thought and sensibility: for him, thought “modified his sensibility”
  • but by late 17th century, it’s changed: dissociation of sensibility occurs (which is bad)
    • now thought separated from sensation of emotion
    • “poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.”
• Metaphysical poets (Donne, Cowley, Bishop King, Chapman)
  • they very often use conceits, figures used to their very ends
  • Johnson coined the term: “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” (Johnson’s phrase)
  • that is, there’s a rapid succession of ideas being brought into association
  • simple, pure language despite complex sentence structures (which only follow progression of an emotion and a thought)
  • “fidelity” to emotion and thought that leads to “variety” of content and rhythm
  • “always analytic” as Johnson said
  • followed from Elizabethan Era from natural development: development of sensibility
  • “incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought”
    • “direct sensuous apprehension of thought into feeling”
      • “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”
• “something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared”
  • When did it change? Around the Revolution, in 17th c
    • “between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet.”
    • “in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered”
    • Milton and Dryden in part did it….
• The newer poets
  • “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”
    • Don’t Feel Their Thought
• Why Are Metaphysics Good?
  • ex. of poet “constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter of the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
    • the poet can fix fragmentary experience: to me, this sounds like what the new theorists of everyday life, Woolf and Mansfield, do
  • “mechanism of sensibility which could devour any type of experience”
    • this is a very ACTIVE aggressive sort of action
• Why is not having it bad?
  • Over time, after the dissociation sets in, “while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude”
  • thus ushered in a “sentimental age” early 18th c, “revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced”
    • despite the sometimes good efforts of Shelley and Keats…they died. while unfortunately Tennyson and Browning “ruminated” on…
  • “dazzling disregard for the soul” of Miltons and Drydens
  • “incomplete” poetry
• the more intelligent a poet is, the better poet he is!
• How to Fix
  • put your heart and your mind in it (“and the digestive tracts”)
  • your thoughts: “turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically” that is find the “verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling”
    • hmmm how could you see Saussure here?
  • “it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult” b/c “our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity” so once you have turned THAT into poetry, will be still more various and complex
    • violent, eh: “must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”
      • seems like the present language isn’t enough
  • Today the people who get there are Laforgue, Corbiere “transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind”
• Yuck: we still need “Johnsonian canons of taste”

”Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923)

• Joyce’s work is “the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need for something stricter” is the ordering myth:
  • “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
  • A classic,early, and influential enunciation of art as saving order (Eysteinnson says it’s religious b/c supposed to save you.)
• “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
• None of the criticism so far has examined “the significance of the method employed – the parallel to the Odyssey, and the use of appropriate styles and symbols to each division.”
  • on Aldington’s review: “Mr Aldington treated Mr Joyce as prophet of chaos; and wailed at the flood of Dadaism which his [Aldington�s] prescient eye saw bursting forth at the tap of a magician�s wand.” as if “to be an invitation to chaos, and an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality. ”
  • however, Aldington is dead wrong, says Eliot
• What they both want (Ald and El)? classicism
  • but don’t agree how to GET it (method)
  • two diff understandings of classicism: one is that you ignore the present; one that you are “doing the best one can with the material in hand”
    • he wants to separate literary classicism from a more general cultural attitude of classicism
• Isn’t a moral issue
  • “not virtues to be enlarged or vices to be diminished. The question, then, about Mr Joyce, is: how much living material does he deal with, and how does he deal with it: deal with, not as a legislator or exhorter, but as an artist?”
• “It is here [what he does w/material on hand] that Mr Joyce�s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary.”
• The Novel
  • “the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter. Mr Joyce has written one novel – the Portrait ; Mr Wyndham. Lewis has written one novel – Tarr. I do not suppose that either of them will ever write another ‘novel.’ The novel ended with Flaubert and with James.”
  • hence, the present moment HAS lost all form and DOES feel the need of something stricter
    • I do like that he taps into the feeling that commentators on realism usually mention but only for a split second: how it’s the “baggy monster” and essentially formless
  • formlessness implies some feeling of a problem with the novel form: “because Mr Joyce and Mr Lewis, being ‘in advance’ of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction with the form, that their novels are more formless…”
    • embracing formlessness is a way to get beyond the obsolete novel form
• The Method
  • “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him …[as] independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
    • me: it’s the inverse process from T and the I T b/c instead of having present art reorganize past art, you have past art reorganizing present art: it’s like a polite favor that Europeans of different times do for each other, how convenient: history is available for him as a solution to problems (how to create and evaluate art; how to find order and meaning in the present)
      • interestingly it’s a strange renunciation of time itself, of historicity, b/c all times are seen together, a constellation in space. this is why he doesn’t say you can have art progressing, getting better as time goes along. it explains why Forster’s narratological perspective sounds so similar to Eliot’s.
      • oddly seems like a way to reject your moment in history by having everything else at your command to make the present better. it’s the opposite of benjamin’s angel of history, where all the bad is collecting in a big pile. so, even while Eliot rhetorically dissociates himself from Aldington’s need for order, he reveals his own need for order by creating a history that isn’t truly history.
      • clearly Eliot sees “history” as a method of organization, where organization happens as you move back and forth along a timeline;
  • Yeats already recognized this need and already developed the method
  • “Psychology…ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr Aldington so earnestly desires..”
  • And everyone must figure out independently how to do that.
• In passing
  • calls it “his realistic tale”
  • gives a dig to Hulme: “We agree, I hope, that ‘classicism� is not an alternative to ‘romanticism�, as of political parties [...] on a “turnout-the-rascals” platform.”