This document provides an overview of T.S. Eliot's important literary works and critical writings. It discusses his poems such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Wasteland. Eliot's critical essays examined the nature of criticism and analyzed authors like the Metaphysical poets. The document also examines Eliot's theories of tradition, impersonality, and the objective correlative. It analyzes how Eliot defended the Metaphysical poets and influenced the development of literary criticism.

1. T S ELIOT
SEMESTER 5
MODULE 4
EN1541 CORE COURSE
LITERARY CRITICISM
SREEKUMAR V. R.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
NSS COLLEGE NILAMEL

2. T S ELIOT

3. IMPORTANT LITERARY WORKS
POEMS
 The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
 The Wasteland
 Four Quartets
POETIC DRAMA
 Murder in the Cathedral
 The Cocktail Party
 Elder Statesman
 The Family Reunion
 The Confidential Clerk

4. CRITICAL WORKS
Eliot’s critical essays falls into 2 categories
 On the nature and function of criticism
 On authors and their works
Important essays
 Tradition and Individual Talent( unofficial critical
manifesto)
 Poetry and Drama
 Function of Criticism
 The English Metaphysical Poets
 The frontiers of Criticism

5.  Openly declared himself as a Classicist in literature,
Royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion
 Notions on religion, politics and literature
indistinguishable
 Lifelong commitment to criticism
 His critical works changed the course of English
literary history
 Criticism should be objective
 Critic has a role to review the past of literature and
set the poets and poems in order

6. THE METAPHYSICAL POETS
 Renewal of interest in Metaphysical poetry which was
neglected for a long time
 Argues metaphysical poetry to be the continuation of a
great tradition
 Contradicts Dr. Johnson’s assumptions-
“heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together”
metaphysical poets failed to unite dissimilar
ideas into a single whole
too much analysis and dissection of particular
emotional situations
inventive use of conceits
“nature and art ransacked for illustrations”

7. METAPHYSICAL CONCEIT
 “ A comparison becomes a conceit when we are
made to concede likeness while being strongly
conscious of unlikeness”- Helen Gardner
 John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
a couple faced with absence from each other
is likened to a compass
o Donne’s The Flea
Flea’s blood sucking to convince a possible
lover to join him in physical sexual union

8. ELIOT’S DEFENSE OF METAPHYSICAL POETS
 Compelling heterogeneous ideas into unity by
operation of poet’s mind is universal in poetry
 Concept of Unification of Sensibility
 Great Elizabethans and early Jacobeans
possessed a developed unified sensibility
 Sensibility- a synthetic faculty which can
amalgamate thought and feeling
 Metaphysical poets possessed this faculty and
were able to fuse dissimilar ideas into a single
whole

9. DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY
 Poets in the 18th and 19th centuries lacked
unification of sensibility
 Dissociation of sensibility set in
 18th century poets- intellectuals; they thought but
did not feel
 Romantic poets- felt but did not think
 Victorian poets- meditate poetically but cannot
express it
 20th century modern poets similar to metaphysical
poets; uses conceits; bound to be difficult

10. THEORY OF IMPERSONALITY
 Stated in Tradition and Individual Talent
 Rejected Romantic subjectivist theory of poetic
creation
 “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…”
Wordsworth
 Two aspects of Impersonal Theory
Matter of Tradition
Creative process

11. SENSE OF TRADITION
 Originality of a poet not in inventing anything new or
differing from his predecessors
 Great European tradition flowing from Homer,
Shakespeare and Dante to modern times
 Poet should permit this great tradition to assert
itself on his poem
 Poem should be a recreation and a development of
what his predecessors have created
 Negative impact
Distrusts novelty/originality
Discourages individual attempts

12.  Positive impact of Traditional sense
Poet should have a sense of the history of poetry
awareness of the presentness of the past
poet surrenders his personality to the superior
authority of Tradition
literature-not self expresion but self surrender
progress of an artist- a continued extinction of
personality

13. POETIC CREATION

14.  Poet’s mind- open to all sorts of sensations and
thoughts
 Receptacle of different feelings
 Combined and fused into a new whole by the
creative mind
 Refutes Wordsworth’s definition- “poetry is a
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…”

15. CATALYSIS
 Example to demonstrate the relationship between
process of depersonalisation and tradition
 Platinum as a catalyst for converting Sulphur and
CO2 into Sulphurous acid
 No change happens to the catalyst
 Mind of the poet- catalyst
 Emotions and feelings- Sulphur and CO2
 Artist’s mind keeps forming new compounds
 He remains separate in the whole process of
creation

16.  Personality of the poet has nothing to do with his
poetry
 Rejects Wordsworth’s theory of emotions
recollected in tranquility
 Poetry- not a turning loose of emotion; but an
escape from emotion
 Not an expression of personality; but an escape
from personality

17. OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
 From the essay Hamlet and his problems
 “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of
art”
 Objective correlative- “a set of objects, a situation,
a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion”
 Emotional reaction doesn’t get stimulated from one
particular object/image/word
 It originates in the combination of these when they
appear together

18.  Objective correlative acts as a medium for the poet
to transmit his emotions to the reader in an
objective way
 Work of art as an artefact; an organic whole
 Successful instance of objective correlative: Sleep
Walking scene in Macbeth
 Hamlet; an artistic failure; lacks objective correlative

19. SLEEP WALKING SCENE IN MACBETH

20. PREFERENCE FOR SPOKEN LANGUAGE
 Poetry should approximate to the spoken language
during the poet’s lifetime
 Not in favour of colloquialisms
 Admires Dante’s language
 Advocates prosaic style in poetry
 Rejects poetic style in prose

21. DEFECTS AS A CRITIC
 Religious attitude in critical pronouncements
 Personal and religious prejudice
 Attack of Milton and Shelley exposes his lack of
objectivity
 Elements of didaticism

22. CONCLUSION
 Eliot’s critical tenets invaluable aids to
understanding and appreciation of poetry
 In objectivity and scientific attitude Eliot resembles
Aristotle
 New Criticism greatly indebted to T S Eliot

23. REFERENCES
 Nagarajan M S English Literary Criticism and
Theory, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan,2006

24. THANK YOU