T.s.Eliot's Poetry

T.s.Eliot's Poetry
Eliot attributed an excellent deal of his early vogue to the French Symbolists--Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Laforgue--whom he 1st encountered in school, during a book by Arthur Symons known as The Symbolist Movement in Literature. it's simple to grasp why a young aspiring author would need to imitate these exciting bohemian figures, however their final impact on his poetry is probably less profound than he claimed. whereas he took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism whereas maintaining a sensibility of language, Eliot additionally developed an excellent deal that was new and original. His early works, like "The Love Song of J. AElfred Prufrock" and also the Waste Land, draw on a good vary of cultural relevancy depict a contemporary world that's in ruins nevertheless somehow stunning and deeply significant. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to form his points while not having to argue them expressly. As author once magnificently aforementioned, Eliot really did "modernize himself." additionally to showcasing a range of poetic innovations, Eliot's early poetry additionally develops a series of characters WHO match the kind of the fashionable man as delineated by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, et al of Eliot's contemporaries. The title character of "Prufrock" could be a excellent example: solitary, neurasthenic, excessively intellectual, and completely incapable of expressing himself to the skin world.

As Eliot grew older, and significantly when he regenerate to Christianity, his poetry modified. The later poems emphasize depth of study over breadth of allusion; they at the same time become a lot of hopeful in tone: so, a piece like Four Quartets explores a lot of philosophical territory and offers propositions rather than nihilism. The experiences of living in European country throughout war II inform the Quartets, that address problems with time, experience, mortality, and art. instead of sorrowful the ruin of recent culture and seeking redemption within the cultural past, because the Waste Land will, the quartets provide ways in which around human limits through art and spirituality. The pastiche of the sooner works is replaced by philosophy and logic, and also the formal experiments of his early years area unit overpassed in favor of a replacement language consciousness, that emphasizes the sounds and different physical properties of words to form musical, dramatic, and different refined effects.

However, whereas Eliot's poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of his career, his poems additionally bear several unifying aspects: all of Eliot's poetry is marked by a aware need to collect the intellectual, the aesthetic, and also the emotional during a method that each honors the past and acknowledges the current. Eliot is often alert to his own efforts, and he ofttimes comments on his poetic endeavors within the poems themselves. This humility, which regularly comes across as melancholy, makes Eliot's a number of the foremost personal, similarly because the most intellectually satisfying, poetry within the West Germanic language.

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Mill on the Floss: Humour


Humour has a vital role to play in “The Mill on the Floss”. Eliot’s novels would have been heavy and didactic without her delightful humour due to her psychological and intellectual approach. It lightens the tragic atmosphere and balances the picture of life delineated by Eliot which is a fusion of the gay and the grave, and makes the picture more lifelike. But the humour is not ordinary rather it is a psychological and intellectual humour soaked into pathos. She fuses together comic irony and mild satire to create humour and her end is to moralize.

In “The Mill on the Floss” Eliot has employed various methods and devices to provoke comedy. Her characters don’t pass witty remarks neither they behave foolishly still they become a source of comedy. They seriously talk about their household linen, furniture, recipes and enter into rows involving family dignity and unconsciously become a source of comedy.

Eliot has created humour by giving ironic treatment to the family background of the Dodsons, their mentality and lifestyle. They were vain of their elevating values but narrow in outlook, sordid in their concern for modesty and they gave meaningless importance to appearances. To them, religion meant ‘revering what was customary and respectable’. The pride in family dignity prevented them from being dishonest and corrupt.

The Uncles and Aunts in the novel are also a delightful source of comedy. The skirmishes between Mr. and Mrs. Glegg produced hilarious humour. Mrs. Glegg is considered one of the best shrews in literature. When Mr. Glegg was busy talking to Bob, she cried out suspiciously:

“Mr. Glegg … are you going to stand talking with the packman till you get murdered in the open daylight.”


At another occasion, at the residence of Pullets, when Mr. Glegg offered her a seat near the fire, she burst out:

“You see I’ve seated myself here, Mr. Glegg; you can roast yourself if you like.”

Mr. and Mrs. Pullet form a funny couple and there exists a mutual fidelity between them. Mrs. Pullet is always ready to bawl over anyone’s calamities. Mr. Tulliver’s illness reminds her of several other ailments. She herself has been suffering from many imaginary diseases and for them she has many medicines.. Mr. Pullet’s chief aim is to look after his wife. He remembers all the medicines dosed to his wife and has collected all the used bottles which he plans to exhibit as a memorial on his wife’s death. Mr. Pullet has ‘natural faculty for ignorance’.

Inspite of being pathetic, the description of the Mosses has also been given a comic touch. Eliot has equated humour with pathos in the Mosses. Mrs. Moss has eight children; yet she felt sorry at the death of her twins. She did not believe in the equality of mankind and thought that the poor must be prepared to receive snubs.

Bob Jakin, too, is a source of titillating humour in the novel. He talks with ‘unembarrassed loquacity’. Mr. Glegg, in his first meeting with Bob, ‘stood open-mouthed in astonishment’.

“He looked at Bob first over his spectacles, then through them, then over them again.”

He became a packman because he had a ‘glib tongue’ and due to this he prevailed upon even Mrs. Glegg like woman to purchase some of his wares. The way he used to cheat his customers with his thumb is really delightful.

The married life of Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver is also comically and ironically treated by Eliot. Mr. Tulliver has the habit to point the inferiority of his wife. He once remarks that his wife is a sort of ‘soft woman’ who goes on breeding ‘stupid lads’ and ‘cute wenches’ to make the world topsy-turvy. All the advices of Mrs. Tulliver always make her husband act exactly ‘in the opposite direction. She was ‘a woman of sparse tears’ and it was a deficit which she miserably felt at funerals. She is more anxious with her China, linen, furniture, etc. then her husband’s illness. It is amusing to see her filled with worry about Tom that whether he will have enough to eat at school and whether the school will be near enough to allow her ‘wash and mend him’.

Eliot’s comic remarks in the novel also add to humour. Talking about Mr. Tulliver’s sister, she remarks that she ‘had quiet thrown herself away in marriage and had crowned her mistakes by having an eighth baby’. At another occasion, she ironically remarks, ‘Mr. Glegg paused, for speaking with much energy for the good of others is naturally exhausting’.

Humour is infact woven into the very texture of the novel and is not superimposed. Her humour is intellectual and not buffoonery rather based on reason and brings about dichotomy between the ideal and the real, appearances and truth. Her humour is psychological too. She does not create humour by apparent situations rather she penetrates deep into the hidden forces which govern human activities. Her humour is not just a foolish laughter rather it has a serious message behind it. She creates humour like a serious thinker. Her humour is deeply soaked into pathos as in the description of Mosses.

Such humour is hardly found either in Fielding or in Austen. It can only be detached and appreciated by a reader having a penetrating eye.

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Eliot’s Depersonalization theory

Eliot’s Depersonalization theory




In "Tradition and Individual Talent", Eliot opposes the Romantic conception by advancing his theory of impersonality in art and opines that the artistic process is a process of depersonalization and that the artist will surrender himself totally to the creative work. Eliot particularly objected to the great Romantics as well as Victorians who exaggerated the need to express human personality and subjective feeling and he says, "The progress of am artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."


Eliot holds that the poet and the poem are two separate things and "that the feelings or the emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet." Hence, he elucidates his theory of impersonality by examining, first, the relation of the poet to the part and secondly, the relation of the poem to its author. Eliot realizes that the past exists in the present. "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His signification, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You can value him alone. You must set him for contrast and comparison among the deads."


Eliot points out the relation of the poem to its author; and says that the poem has no relation to the poet. There is detached or alienation between the poet and his poem. The difference between the mind of a nature poet and that of am immature one is that the mind of a nature poet is "a more finely perfected medium in which special or varied feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations". According to Eliot, the art emotion is different from personal emotion. A successful artist s he, who can generalize emotion in the reader's one while he himself seemed to be unaffected by any emotion. In the other hand he should be depersonalized in experience he describes in the poem.


Eliot brings the analogy of chemical reaction to explain the process of depersonalization. In this respect he has drawn a scientific analogy. He tells that a poet should serve the sold of platinum which makes sulphurus acid. He says, "When the two gases, previously mentioned (oxygen and Sulpher dioxide) are mixed in the presence of a filament of Platinum. They form Sulphurous acid. The combination takes place only he the Platinum is present; nevertheless, the newly formed acid contains no trace of Platinum, and the Platinum itself is apparently unaffected has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of Platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in his will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates, the one perfectly will be the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."


Eliot next compares the poet's mind to a receptacle in which are stored numberless feelings, emotion, images, phases etc. , which remain there in an unorganized and chaotic form till, "all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." Thus poetry is organization rather than inspiration. And the greatness of a poem does not depend upon the greatness or the intensity of the emotions, but upon the intensity of the process of poetic composition. The more intense the poetic process, the greater the poem.


He strongly believes that "the differences between art and the event are always absolute. Eliot illustrate his view by a few examples among which one is of Keats' One to a Nightingale, which contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale ,partly perhaps because it's attractive name, and partly because of it's reputation served to bring together. He illustrates his theory by a few examples. The artistic emotion evoked by Dante in his treatment of the episode of Paolo and Francesca is different from the actual emotion in the situation. The artistic emotion may approximate to the actual emotion as in Agamemnon the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of am actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself.


Eliot believes that the main concern of the poet is not the expression of personality. He says, “the poet has, not a personality to express but a particular medium which is only a medium and a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways, impressions and experiences which are important for the may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality”. Again, there is no need for poet to try to express new human emotions in poetry. The business of the poet. Eliot says, is not to find new emotions, but use of the ordinary ones and, in working them up in poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all". Eliot's final definition of poetry is:"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."


It is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. He emphasizes the same theory of impersonality in art. The emotion of art is impersonal. It has its life in the poem and not in the history of poets. So, honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. The poet's biography is not to be studied the structure of the poem and its evocative powers are important.


Eliot's theory of depersonalization has been criticized by critics like Ransom and Yvor Winters. Ransom regards Eliot's theory as “very neatly a doctrine of poetic automation".


To Fei Pai Lu, Eliot's theory of depersonalization is completely vague. He says, "in the name of impersonality", Eliot by turns commends and censures poets and artist.


From what we have said, above it follows that there as no connection between the poet's personality and the poem. The feelings of the poetry need not necessarily his own.

Read more »

Eliot’s Depersonalization theory

Eliot’s Depersonalization theory

In "Tradition and Individual Talent", Eliot opposes the Romantic conception by advancing his theory of impersonality in art and opines that the artistic process is a process of depersonalization and that the artist will surrender himself totally to the creative work. Eliot particularly objected to the great Romantics as well as Victorians who exaggerated the need to express human personality and subjective feeling and he says, "The progress of am artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

Eliot holds that the poet and the poem are two separate things and "that the feelings or the emotion, or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet." Hence, he elucidates his theory of impersonality by examining, first, the relation of the poet to the part and secondly, the relation of the poem to its author. Eliot realizes that the past exists in the present. "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His signification, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You can value him alone. You must set him for contrast and comparison among the deads."

Eliot points out the relation of the poem to its author; and says that the poem has no relation to the poet. There is detached or alienation between the poet and his poem. The difference between the mind of a nature poet and that of am immature one is that the mind of a nature poet is "a more finely perfected medium in which special or varied feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations". According to Eliot, the art emotion is different from personal emotion. A successful artist s he, who can generalize emotion in the reader's one while he himself seemed to be unaffected by any emotion. In the other hand he should be depersonalized in experience he describes in the poem.

Eliot brings the analogy of chemical reaction to explain the process of depersonalization. In this respect he has drawn a scientific analogy. He tells that a poet should serve the sold of platinum which makes sulphurus acid. He says, "When the two gases, previously mentioned (oxygen and Sulpher dioxide) are mixed in the presence of a filament of Platinum. They form Sulphurous acid. The combination takes place only he the Platinum is present; nevertheless, the newly formed acid contains no trace of Platinum, and the Platinum itself is apparently unaffected has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of Platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in his will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates, the one perfectly will be the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."

Eliot next compares the poet's mind to a receptacle in which are stored numberless feelings, emotion, images, phases etc. , which remain there in an unorganized and chaotic form till, "all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." Thus poetry is organization rather than inspiration. And the greatness of a poem does not depend upon the greatness or the intensity of the emotions, but upon the intensity of the process of poetic composition. The more intense the poetic process, the greater the poem.

He strongly believes that "the differences between art and the event are always absolute. Eliot illustrate his view by a few examples among which one is of Keats' One to a Nightingale, which contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale ,partly perhaps because it's attractive name, and partly because of it's reputation served to bring together. He illustrates his theory by a few examples. The artistic emotion evoked by Dante in his treatment of the episode of Paolo and Francesca is different from the actual emotion in the situation. The artistic emotion may approximate to the actual emotion as in Agamemnon the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of am actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself.

Eliot believes that the main concern of the poet is not the expression of personality. He says, “the poet has, not a personality to express but a particular medium which is only a medium and a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways, impressions and experiences which are important for the may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality”. Again, there is no need for poet to try to express new human emotions in poetry. The business of the poet. Eliot says, is not to find new emotions, but use of the ordinary ones and, in working them up in poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all". Eliot's final definition of poetry is:"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."

It is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. He emphasizes the same theory of impersonality in art. The emotion of art is impersonal. It has its life in the poem and not in the history of poets. So, honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. The poet's biography is not to be studied the structure of the poem and its evocative powers are important.

Eliot's theory of depersonalization has been criticized by critics like Ransom and Yvor Winters. Ransom regards Eliot's theory as “very neatly a doctrine of poetic automation".

To Fei Pai Lu, Eliot's theory of depersonalization is completely vague. He says, "in the name of impersonality", Eliot by turns commends and censures poets and artist.

From what we have said, above it follows that there as no connection between the poet's personality and the poem. The feelings of the poetry need not necessarily his own.


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