Depersonalization is the action of detaching the personal self from something. In the context of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” depersonalization is the process the traditional poet goes through to make their poetry less personal and more in keeping with Eliot’s Impersonal Theory instead. The poet depersonalizes their poetry by working up complex arrangements of common emotions instead of their personal emotions. The poet further depersonalizes their work by not using it to express their own feelings and by remaining neutral in the entire writing process. In depersonalizing their poetry, they become more traditional, because they are conscious not of themselves but of the whole history of poetry.

1. Name:- Dhruvita Dhameliya
Roll no:- 03
Enrollment number:-4069206420210006
Subject:- Literary Theory & Criticism and Indian Aesthetics
Paper no:- 109
Topic:- Theory of Depersonalisation
Submitted to:- S. B.Gardi Department of English , MKBU
New Criticism - Theory of
Depersonalisation

2. What is New Criticism?
New criticism is a formalist movement in literary theory that originated in the
first half of the 20th century. In new criticism, the texts are considered to be
‘closed’ and autonomous, meaning that everything you need to understand a
work of literature is present within it. Therefore, readers do not need outside
sources like details about the author to fully understand literary work. In fact,
new criticism was a reaction towards biographical and traditional historical
criticism, which focused on extra-text materials to analyze a text. (Britannica)

3. New Critics :-
The New Critic or Formalist uses a concept known as “close reading” to scrutinize the text
to discover the complex relationship between the elements of the text and its general
theme. Such elements include irony, paradox, ambiguity, metaphor, simile, and tension.
These all make up the “organic unity” of the text which basically means the elements of
the text work together to make and inseparable whole.
According to New Critics, the structure and meaning of the text are closely connected and
can not be analyzed separately. Since their main focus is on the text itself, they exclude
factors like the author’s intention, readers’ response, moralistic bias and historical and
cultural contexts form the analysis.(Britannica)

4. New Critics :-
Many critics like T.S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and others wrote extensive
essays to defend New Criticism or address its problems. These writers were all particular
theorists. Some notable issues they dealt with include depersonalization, six things to exclude
from criticism, and the heresy of paraphrase.
1) T.S. Eliot dealt with depersonalization and said that the art of criticizing literature was
becoming more of a science thus disrobing the work of its personal flavor.
2) John Crowe Ransom talked about six things to exclude from criticism, some of which
are moral studies, biographical studies, and synopsis and paraphrase. These studies are
vastly different than what New Criticism seeks to learn by looking “at the text
itself”.(Britannica)

5. Thomas Stearns Eliot
T.S. Eliot was a renowned Anglo American essayist, publisher, playwright, poet and a
literary and social critic of the twentieth century. Aside from his contribution to
modernist literature he was also a significant Writer of literary Criticism while somewhat
introspective and critical of his own work - he once said his criticism was just a ‘By
product’ of his ‘private Poetry workshop’.(In literary theory and criticism)
Eliot wrote, “ In a peculiar sense an artist or poet … must inevitable be judged by the
standard of the past , “ Eliot himself implemented this concept on many of his works,
especially on his famous long poem The Wasteland.(acedemia.edu)

6. Traditional and individual talent
Eliot’s essay is one of the most successful essays written in the twentieth
century and of which different interpretations are available. It was first
published as an anonymous work in “The Egoist, a London literary review, in
September and December1919”.This essay is a major “contributor” to the rise of
modernism and “hegemony”.
Das considers it “a milestone in the field of literary criticism in the twentieth
century” (Das, 2005: 229). Eliot’s aim in writing his most famous essay
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is to emphasise the significance of the link
of a poem by a poet to other poems by other authors, which was
called“literary history” but in recent times termed “intertextuality”
(ResearchGate)

7. Theory of Depersonalisation T.S. Eliot
The theory of depersonalization or impersonality is
T.S.Eliot's remarkable gift in criticism. He holds that the
poet and the poem are two separate things. Eliot explains
his theory in two phases,
1)"The relation of the poet to the past,"
2)"The relation of the poem to its author”.( academia.edu)

8. Traditional and individual talent
T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and individual Talent’ is one of the critical essay in which
Eliot has described with concept of tradition, individual talent, emotion and
poetry as well as his concept of depersonalized art in the opening of the essay,
Eliot defines tradition" which is literary history. He says that, “Each and every
nation has it’s individual genius who create literature. So many such individual
writers produce a big bulk of writing which is tradition”. (academia.edu)
“TRADITION IS NOT SOMETHING DEAD IT IS ALREADY LIVING”

9. Theory of Depersonalisation
Depersonalization is the action of detaching the personal self from something. In the
context of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” depersonalization is the process the
traditional poet goes through to make their poetry less personal and more in keeping
with Eliot’s Impersonal Theory instead. The poet depersonalizes their poetry by
working up complex arrangements of common emotions instead of their personal
emotions. The poet further depersonalizes their work by not using it to express their
own feelings and by remaining neutral in the entire writing process. In
depersonalizing their poetry, they become more traditional, because they are
conscious not of themselves but of the whole history of poetry.(academia.edu)

10. Continue..
As for the first phase, he says that the past is never dead, it lives in the present. And
if we approach a poet with an open mind, "We shall often find that not only the best,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Again if he is a great poet, he
alters his work in no small scale. So what is a sort of flowing out and in. But while in
giving he asserts his individuality, in taking he has to repress it. The progress of an
artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." According to
him it is the duty of the poet to discard the touch of personality in his work: and as a
result a new form will come out from the fusion of the past and the present..

11. Example of The Waste Land
Several decades after its publication, most researchers and critics have interpreted
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land -1922 through the lens of Eliot's critical theory. As a
result, different entries into the dark areas of his hidden self have been neglected.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land's reception, discussions, and re-readings can be
divided into three major stages.
1) The first is dominated by the New Critics and those moving in their wake.
2) The second is a reaction against these close readings and shifting to Eliot's early
philosophical writings.
3) The third orients itself to theoretical concerns with
language.(publication.ijllt.org)

12. Conclusion
We can conclude that hidden inner self of the poet, which resembles the details in
the poem defeating Eliot's "impersonal theory." It is through myth, allusion, and
dramatic monologue, all used as objective correlatives, that Eliot simultaneously
describes personal suffering and renders it external and therefore impersonal.
Eliot succeeds in finding objective expression for the purely subjective. By fusing
the personal with the mythic, Eliot is capable of a "continual self sacrifice,"
masking his experience in his personae. The voices in The Waste Land are thus
"both past and present, both personal and universal, both autobiographical and
historical... a poem both richly historical and painfully autobiographical

14. Work Citation
Adhikary, Biswajit. “T . s . Eliot's Theory of Depersonalization.docx.” Academia.edu, 9 Nov. 2016,
www.academia.edu/29758867/T_S_Eliots_Theory_of_Depersonalization_docx
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "New Criticism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Feb. 2018,
https://www.britannica.com/art/New-Criticism. Accessed 14 April 2022.
Adhikary, Biswajit. “T . s . Eliot's Theory of Depersonalization.docx.” Academia.edu, 9 Nov. 2016,
https://www.academia.edu/29758867/T_S_Eliots_Theory_of_Depersonalization_docx.
Alghanem, Alanoud Abdulaziz. “Depersonalization: Deconstructing Eliot's Notion in the Waste Land.”
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, Al-Kindi Center for Research and Development,
27 June 2020, https://publication.ijllt.org/publications/314870/depersonalization-deconstructing-eliots-
notion-in-the-waste-land#cite.