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T.S. Eliot-One of The First Modern Critics
T.S. Eliot-One of The First Modern Critics
T.S. Eliot-One of The First Modern Critics
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.
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