This blog is a task given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I am going to attend some questions of the essay 'Tradition and Individual Talent' which is written by T.S. Eliot.
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. This essay was first published in The Egoist in 1919 and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood'' in 1920. This essay was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. It is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays".
This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of the 20th century.
The essay is divided into three main sections:
The first gives us Eliot’s concept of tradition;
The second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry.
The third part he concludes the debate by saying that the poet's sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.
While Eliot is getting known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary criticism. In this dual role, he acted as a cultural critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the better known works of Eliot. He wrote and produced that in his critical capacity.
Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” made a huge impact towards establishing the New Criticism by proposing that poetry should be an impersonal and objective practice.
In Eliot’s words, “art may be said to approach the condition of science”.
Here are some questions and their answers mentioned in the task.
1) How would you like to explain Eliot's concept of Tradition ? Do you agree with it? What do you understand by Historical sense ?
In Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot argues that tradition is not simply a collection of past works, but it is rather an ongoing process of artistic creation and critical evaluation. He defended the role of tradition in helping new poets to be modern. This is one of the paradoxes of his writing. He points out that a true artist must have a historical sense, which involves understanding and engaging with the literary tradition that precedes them, in order to create new, original work. Eliot also asserts that the individual talent of the artist should be subsumed by the tradition, and that true greatness in art comes from the ability to transform and renew the tradition.
He believes that tradition is not just about preserving the past, but about constantly building upon it and creating new, original works. Eliot argues that tradition is not static, but dynamic and constantly evolving. This allows the artist to create new works that are both original and connected to the past.
Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do.
For Eliot, Tradition has a three-fold significance.
Firstly, tradition cannot be inherited and involves a great deal of labor and erudition.
Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves apperception not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence.
Thirdly, the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continuous literary tradition.
According to Eliot tradition and individual talent are not separate entities. They are inseparable and hence go together.
To him knowledge of tradition plays a vital role in the development of personal talent. He writes,
“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves the historical sense.” This means-
"The historical sense involves a perception, not only of pastness of the past, but of it presence"
" This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional."
In these lines he said that writers should have knowledge of the past, because that knowledge makes contemporary writers part of that tradition and part of that contemporary sense. Eliot's own poetry was influenced by Homer and Dante's writing, both traditional and modern writers. For another example Shakespear was considered a 'Timeless poet' "he was not for any particular age but for all time " according to his friend Ben Johnson. whose work is constantly being reinvented, to be understood by Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political attitudes.
[2] What is the relationship between "Tradition and Individual talent", according to the poet T.S.Eliot?
He says that there is a distinction between knowledge and pedantry.
“Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential histories from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum”.
What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
He starts the second part of his essay with:
“Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”.
By these lines he wanted to say that the artist or the poet adopts the process of depersonalization, which is “a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
He says that right and honest criticism is when we appreciate a poet's poetry when it is creative and good. Right criticism is when we criticize poetry, not a poet.
There still remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to sense of tradition.
[3] How would you like to explain Eliot's theory of depersonalization ? You can explain with the help of a chemical reaction in the presence of a catalyst agent, platinum.
"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."
Eliot explains this by comparing it to a chemical process – “The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gasses Oxygen and Sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”
The elements of the experience of the poet are of two kinds – emotions and feelings. They are the elements which enter the presence of the poet’s mind and act as a catalyst, go to the making of a work of art. The final effect produced by a work of art may be formed out of several emotions into one, it may be formed out of a single emotion or out of the feelings invoked in the poet by various words and images. Thus the poet’s mind is a container for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles, which can unite to form a new compound, are present together.
Every poet and writer had interesting personalities. Their particular emotions may be flat, simple. It is not compulsory that a Poet should find new emotion, but he could use his old emotion and work on it and express his feelings upon poetry. Only those who have emotion and personality know what it means to escape from these things.
Finally he ends his essay with this line - “very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”
Thank You.
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