T.S. Eliot: Literary Criticism, Influence, and Concepts
T.S. Eliot’s Impact as a Critic
Two factors support T.S. Eliot’s greatness as a critic:
He single-handedly modified the literary taste of English Literature. He lessened the importance of the 19th century, including the Romantics and the Victorian period, within the canon. He did more than any of his contemporaries to relegate the 19th century to a secondary position.
Jacobean tragedy was developed during the reign of James I in the 17th century. Eliot revitalized Jacobean tragedy and brought back into the canon Metaphysical poetry, including the works of John Donne.
He also gave importance to Dante Alighieri and continued to revitalize symbolist poetry.
Eliot strongly criticizes Milton because he wrote English imitating the patterns of Latin poetry, considering this a flaw.
The second reason for his critical importance is that he contributed many fundamental critical concepts to posterity.
Key Critical Concepts
The Concept of Impersonal Poetry
The poem has no relationship with the poet; it is an autonomous object independent of the poet. Once the poet has created it, there is no way to observe any links between them. If the poem and the poet are from different universes, ‘any explanation by origins will be a fallacy and a mistake.’ To explain the poem based on the poet is a mistake.
The work of art is located ‘somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to ‘express’, or his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or the writer as reader.’
The poem ‘in some sense, has its own life […] the feeling or emotion, or vision resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet.’
Creation is ‘when something new has happened, something that cannot wholly be explained by anything that went before.’ Thus, true literary creation cannot be explained by origins.
‘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.’ You are not trying to express what you feel, but you try to liberate yourself from your fears, emotions, and feelings, to go far beyond what you feel because you don’t like what you feel.
‘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.’
Eliot’s dogmatism regarding poetic impersonality belongs to his early years as a critic. When he was a young man, he said that the poem has nothing to do with the poet, but as he grew older, he modified his early views. As an older man, he tended to accept that the poet’s personality was in some way present in his poetry. When you analyze The Waste Land, you might expect to find an impersonal poem, but there’s a critical tradition that used to say that Eliot used that poem to solve his personal problems, using the poem as therapy because he was depressed.