Tradition and Individual talent-T.S. Eliot

• The essay is divided into three parts.

1. Concept of tradition

2. Theory of Depersonalization

3. conclusion

Theory of Depersonalization

Chemical reaction-

combination of Oxygen and Sulphur dioxide =Sulphur Trioxide

O2+ So2= SO3

Sulphur Trioxide+ Water= Sulphuric Acid

SO3+H2O=H2SO4

Sulphur dioxide + water = Sulphurous Acid

SO3+ H2O= H2SO4

• Platinum is catalyst.( without it process does not take place)

• But newly formed Sulphuric Acid has no traces of Platinum.

• So here let’s see a video to understand this chemical process in more detail.

Theory of poetry

emotions+ feelings+ experiences = Poetry

Poet’s mind is catalyst. Without it poetry is notpossible. But poet’s personality is not there in thepoem.

Thus the poet’s mind is receptacle ( container) forseizing and storing up numberless feelings,emotions, phrases, images, which remain thereuntil all the particles, which can unite to form anew compound, as present together.

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 passion which are its material.

Example : where is Shakespeare in his plays???

• Emotions and experiences in the art are different than the emotions and the experiences of the artist.

• ( example: Tess of the d'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy )

Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those became important in poetry may play quite negligible part in the man, the personality.

• The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use ordinary ones and, in working them into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotion at all.

Anti Romanticism

• Eliot believes that ‘ emotion recollected in tranquility’ is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion nor recollection.

• It is a concentration, new thing resulting out from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experience at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.

• “ poetry is not a turning lose of emotion, but

an escape from emotion; it is not the

expression of the personality, but an escape

from personality”. But of course, only those who have personality and emotions knows what it means to want to escape from these things.

Limitations of essay

Juvenile effort

Euro centric

Backward looking

Obsessed with order

Elitist

Conservative, orthodox

Anxiety of Influence- Harold Bloom