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