TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT
T.S. ELIOT (1919)
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
Which is more important? Emotion or excellence?
• The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet
cannot reach this impersonality without
surrendering himself wholly to the work to be
done.
• Process of depersonalization
• Artist is different from the man
• There is a separation between the creator of art
from the person experiencing life
• The poet’s mind is a receptacle of feelings,
phrases, images the poet has, not a “personality”
to express, but a particular medium, in which
impressions and experiences combine within the
work.
Tradition
• the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even
“too traditional.”
• When we praise a poet upon those aspects of his
work in which he least resembles anyone else
• We try to find what makes them original or what
makes the writer individual
• The most individual parts of their work those in
which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously
• This means the maturity
• If tradition means being handed down or
following the old ways, then it should be
discouraged.
• Tradition involves a historical sense that the past
is not only in the past but that it has its presence
in the here and the now, then it should be
discouraged
What makes a writer traditional?
• Timeless and temporal
• No artist has his complete meaning alone
• You cannot value him alone; you must set him,
for contrast and comparison, among the dead
• When a new works of art is created, it
simultaneously modifies the meaning of the
works of art which preceded it.
• And the poet who is aware of this will be aware
of great difficulties and responsibilities.
• And we do not quite say that the new is more
valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a
test of its value.
• The poet must be very conscious of the main
current be quite aware of the obvious fact that
art never improves, but that the material of art is
never quite the same difference between the
present and the past is that the conscious present
is an awareness of the past.
• We know so much more than whose who came
before us the poet must develop or procure the
consciousness of the past and that he should
continue to develop this consciousness
throughout his career.
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LITERARY IDEALS OR STANDARDS ACCORDING
TO PAZ LATORENA’S EDUCATING THE LITERARY
TASTE
Literary Criticism
• Formal action of the mind of the writer
Literary Taste
• Can Taste be taught?
• The pressure falls on the teacher of literature
• Eventually everything will let man down.
• He will need to have a good literary taste.
• The literary values that will serve this purpose
Intellectual value
• Unlike all the other arts, literature appeal to
intellect.
Emotional value
• Pleasant or unpleasant
• Distinguishing mark of great literature
• Something painful can be turned into something
beautiful
• Catharsis: releasing strong or repressed emotions
• Emotion that control conduct as moral beings
Ethical value
• Literature’s Purpose: instruction and aesthetic
• Immoral can’t be pleasurable nor instructive
• “Anything that us not accepted by a previous
generation can be easily accepted by the next
generation.”
• Representing the whole life is a much better work
of literature
• Retribution
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INFERNO (CANTO V)
DANTE ALIGHIERI TRANS. JOHN CIERDI
• Divina Comedia or the “La Comedia”
• Written while in exile 1302-1321
• The first major literary work written in the italian
language
• Terza Rima
• Abandon all hope ye who enter here
• Hell according to Dante is composed of nine
concentric circles
Canto V
Circle Two - The Carnal (Summary)
“A smaller circle of so much greater pain”
• The pit of hell tapers like a funnel.
• The circles of ledges accordingly grow smaller as
they descend.
“There Minos sits, grinning, grotesque, and hale.”
“Appears before him it confesses all”
• Making the point that sinners elect their hell by
an act of their own will.
“It is his fate to enter every door.”
• There is a need for Dante to experience the whole
journey.
“Now the choir of anguish, like a wound,
strikes through the tortured air. Now I have come
to hell's full lamentation, sound beyond sound.”
• The sound confirms that the real pain of torture
for sinners begins here.
“And this, I learned, was the never-ending flight
of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and
lusty who betrayed reason to their appetite.”
• Take note of the equation that desire = appetite
“So come these spirits, wailing as they fly.”
THE SINNERS FOUND IN THE CIRCLE
1. She is Semiramis of whom the tale is told how
she married Ninus and succeeded him
a. She was a queen of Assyria who took the
power of the throne
2. The other is Dido; faithless to the ashes of
Sichaeus, she killed herself for love.
a. Founder of the city of Carthage.
b. She killed herself for love.
3. Sense-drugged Cleopatra. See Helen there,
4. And great Achilles, who fought at last with love
in the house of prayer.
5. And Paris. And Tristan.
“To speak a word with those two swept together”
• This line talks about Paolo and Francesca.
“Love, which permits no loved one not to love,
took me so strongly with delight in him
that we are one in hell, as we were above.”
• It does not mean that the love of paolo and
francesca survives hell itself.
“Cai'na waits for him who took our lives”
• The first ring of the last circle, where lie those
who performed acts of treachery against their kin.
“Francesca, what you suffer here melts me to tears
of pity and of pain.”
• It portrays this persona of Dante as a very
romantic, easy to feel the sorrow of others
“By what appearances found love the way to lure
you to his perilous paradise?”
• Curiosity of Dante to know how such a sin can
befall this two lovers.
“On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme of
Lancelot, how love had mastered him.”
• Like Tristan and Iseult, which came before the
story of Lancelot falling for Guinevere, king
Arthur’s wife.
“That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.”
• This refers to Gallehault, who urged Lancelot and
Guinevere on to love.
“And faint away with anguish. I was swept by such
a swoon as death is, and I fell,”
• These two swoons early in the descent show him
most susceptible to the grief about him.
• Alighieri harkens back to the poetic tradition of
those who came before him
The Author: Durante Alighieri
BACKGROUND
• Born in 1265 in Florence, Italy to a notable family
of modest means.
• At twelve years old, he was betrothed to Gemma
di Manetto Donati, though he had already fallen
in love with another girl, Beatrice Portinari, who
he continued to write about throughout his life.
• Studied many poetry, painting, and music. Latin
poetry of classical antiquity, including homer and
Virgil.
• He was against Pope Benedict VIII and was
placed in exile which prevented him from
returning to Florence.
The Work: La Comedia
BACKGROUND
• Unlike the epic poems of Homer and Virgil, which
told the great stories of their people's history,
Dante's the divine comedy is a somewhat
autobiographical work.
• The epic follows Dante's own allegorical journey
through hell, purgatory, and paradise.
• Guided at first by the character of Virgil, and later
by his beloved Beatrice. Here, Dante wrote of his
own path to salvation.
• It was written in the vernacular Italian, instead of
the more acceptable Latin or Greek. Making the
work available to a much broader audience,
contributing substantially to world literacy.
• Postmodern classic
• Autobiographical or metafictional?
• Historiographic metafiction