T.S.

Eliot-one of the first modern critics

Thomas Stearns Eliot, known as T.S. Eliot, was an essayist, publisher,

playwright,literary and social critic.He was born in St. Louis, Missouri but he imigrated
to England in 1914 (at age 25) settling, workind and marrying there.He was eventually
naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship.
He won numerous awards and honours in his lifetime, including the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1948.
T.S Eliots criticism has created sensations first in England and then in the Englishspeaking world.The eminent historian Rene Wellek wrote in his history of Modern
Criticism that T.S Eliot is by far the most important critic of the twentieth century in
the English speaking world.
He was the first great critic who laid the foundation of practical criticism.Toghether
with I.A. Richards, he gave twentieth century criticism a local habitation and a name.
Both Eliot and Richards presaged the New Criticism in Americain 1940s.In To Criticize
the Critic, Eliot takes stock of his own criticism and makes as it were, an introspective
study as a critic.
His influence on contemporary taste in poetry was most conspicuous, he has done more
than anybody else to promote, the Shift of Sensibility away from the taste of the
Georgians and to revaluate the major figures and periods in the history of English
poetry.
He reacted most strongly against Romanticism, he criticized Milton and the Miltonic
tradition, he exalted Dante, the Jacobean dramatists, the metaphysical poets, Dryden and
the French symbolists as the tradition of great poetry.
T.S Eliots activity as a critic may be discussed under three headings.First is his
judgements upon English writers which had a great influence on the taste of his time.The
second is the conception upon the work of art, some of his major concepts are

impersonal poetry, the objective-correlativeand his justification of tradition.The

third is the function of criticism set on a rational basis.
The bulk of his critical work is impressive.In the 20s and 30s he published the
following books:The Sacred Wood:Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), Homage to
John Dryden(1924), For Lancelot Andrews:Essays on Style and Order(1928),Sellected
Esseys 1917-1932 (1932),The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism(1933), Elizabethan
Essays (1934).
In the Sacred Wood (1920), the essay The Perfect Critic diagnoses the disease of early
20th century criticism as verbalism and impressionism. The impressionistic critic is
defined as a sensibility which mixed critical and creative reactions, an incomplete
artist.The essay discredits the dogmatic critic, who tries to coerce, to lay down the
rules, to make judgements of worse and better.
In Imperfect Critics, he states that criticism is first of all supposed to provide a reason
for reading:to stimulate the taste for an author.He also speaks of sensous thought, a
formula that means to him thinking through the senses,or the senses thinking.
The essay Hamlet and His Problems Includes the famous finding of the objective
correlative.The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
objective correlative, in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall the formula of the particularemotion, such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.Its
pretext is Eliots feeling that Hamlet is an artistic failure.the caracters emotions are
inexpressible, they exceed by far the ability of Shakespeares words.These uttered
emotions are in excess of the facts.There is no adequate objective correlative,Eliot
concludes,for Hamlet feelings.Eliot even claims that Shakespeare himself may have
ignored what was going on inside his own characters heart.Consequently, Shakespeare
was not able to present Hamlet accurately.
In Dante we learn that philosophy is no more than an ingredient of poetic world.Eliot
thought that a poet could borrow a philosophic system for his poetry.Poetry seemed to
him to be better if it had a clear and tenable philosophic pattern.The bussines of the poet
is not to produce ideas, but on the emotions that lurk behind his words.In the same
essay,there is a sentence which explains why Eliot chose for his poetry a subject matter

which to previous generations appeared totally unpoetic:The contemplation of the horrid

or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the
pursuit of beauty.
The Function of criticism,1923,(Selected Essays,1932) discusses the part played by
criticism in creation proper.Creation turns out to be the highest fulfillment of all critical
activity.The criticism of practitioners is then described as belonging to those writers
whose critical activity is not all discharged in their work, and may try to use what is left
of in commenting on their own or other writers work.
In The Metaphysical Poets(1921) the famous dissociation os sensibility is defined.The
poets of the 17th century(John Donne in particular) are said to have effected a recreation
of thought into feeling,and also to have achived in their poetry a direct sensous
apprehersion of thought.The metaphysicals,Eliot further explains, possessed a
mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experienceThey did not
merely meditate on ideas poetically.Their unified sensibility managed to find the verbal
equivalent for states of mindd and feeling.It transmuted ideas into sensation.It
transformed an observation into a state of mind.The metaphysical were intellectual
poets.After them,Eliot holds, a dissociation of sensibility set in , from which we have
never recovered.
Eliots essay on the Metaphysical Poets is one of the most significant critical documents
of the modern age.Eliot has thrown new light on the metaphysical poets, and shown that
they are neither quaint nor fantastic,but great and mature poets.They do not represent a
digression from the mainstream of English poetry but rather a continuation of it.His
theory of the dissociation of sensibility, has caused much critical re-valuation and
rethinking. In the words of Frank Kermode, the poets henceforth began to change their
thinking with passion, to restore to poetry a truth independent of the presumptuous
intellect.
Tradition and the Individual Talent explains that literature as a whole is a system, a
certain order of works.The essay tries to define the place of the reader, writer and critic in
this ideal order.Tradition is an all-embracing term.It includes a historical sense(a
perception not only of the pastness, a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal
togheter).Any writer must have the feeling that all literature is contemporary to him, that

all literature is a simultaneuous order.Every poet must cohere, Eliot says.No poet can be
valued alone.He must conform to the past.At the same time, the old must conform to
what is new:the past is altred by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
In this light, erudition appears as a consciousness of the past.Somewhere else,he even
says that a poet who borrows from other writers becomes a real bearer of tradition.The
poets progress is descriebed here as a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality.The sentence that tradition requires surrender, depersonalization of the artist,
has become a commonplace quotation, although its meaning is not any dearer now that it
was in Eliots time.
Another well-known opinion expresses in this essay is:honest criticism is directed not
upon the poet but upon the poetry.A so-called,impersonal theory of poetry , of the
creation of poetry follows.In order to make it dear,Eliot resorts to a comparison from the
field of chemistry.The mind of the mature poet is like a filament of platinum introduced
into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.The result is the appearance of a
mixture,the sulphurous acid.Although the combination cannot take place if the platinum
is not present, the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum.The platinum itself
remains unaffected by the process.In the same way, the artists mind is a receptable for
feelings, phrases, images which is digest, it transmutes into a work of art.The conclusion
is that the poet has not personality to express, but a particular medium.This medium of
poetry concentrates,fuses generalized the personal emotions into a poem which has
nothing to do with the individual life it springs from. Eliot holds that we must not look
for the poem in the poem, as he will not be there.
The essay concludes that the emotion of art is impersonal.It is a significant emotion
which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet
T.S. Eliot became a figure in the tradition he made himself famous by attacking.He
was a critic of modern society and modern culture who ended up an icon with the
institution that is one of modernitys moments, the twentieth-century university.This is a
fate that may have disappointed him, but it would probably not have surprised him.
When T.S. Eliot died, wrote Robert Giroux, the world became a lesser place.He was
also revered by Igor Stranvinsky not only as a great sorcerer of words but as the very
key keeper of the language.

Northrop Frye simply states:A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for

anyone interested in contemporary literature.Whether he is liked or disliked is of no
importance, but he must be read.

BIBLIOGRAFIE

T.S. Eliot-Selected Essays

Sibisan, Aura-An Anthology of Theoretical and Literary Texts
Sibisan, Aura-T.S. Eliot an author for all seasons
Vianu, Lidia-T.S. Eliot an author for all seasons
Internet:www.wikipedia.com