Assignment
Name- Hareshwari Kapdi
Sem-2
Batch-2019-2020
Roll no-6
Submitted to- Smt.S.B. Gardi Department of English
Paper- Literary Criticism
Paper no-7
Course:- M.A. English
Topic:- Tradition and individual Talent
#Introduction:-
The essay Function of Criticism 1923, arose out of a controversy. Eliot,s essay Tradition and individual Talent was published a few year earlier in 1919. Middleton Murray challenged the opinions of Eliot in his essay Romanticism and the Tradition. The present essay is Eliot's reply to Murry.
The first part gives in brief the opinions expressed by Eliot in the essay Tradition and Individual Talent, in the second part, he gives a resume of the views of Middleton Murry, in the third part, these views of Murry are briefly dismissed, and in the concluding. Fourth part, the poet examines the different aspects of the nature and function of criticism.
# Thomas Stearns Eliot:-
"The progress of an artist is a continual self- sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
-(T.S. Eliot)
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
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British poet
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Playwright
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Essayist
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Publisher
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Social and literary critic
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One of the twentieth century's major poet.
# Essays:-
#Meaning of Tradition:-
By " tradition", Eliot man's the poet's of the past as a whole. However, Eliot has used the term in a wider sense. It means more than a literary tradition. In addition, it refers to social, historical, economic and cultural factors which influence the poet.
# Main concepts of Essay:-
The essay " Tradition and Individual Talent" was first published in " The Egoist" , " The Egoist" was a literary magazine, which is considered today as "England's Most important Modernist Periodical". This essay was later published in " The Sacred Wood", which is Eliot's first book of criticism.
# Tradition and individual Talent:-
"Tradition and individual Talent" is an essay written by poet and Literary critic T.S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, " The Sacred wood" (1920). "The essay is also available in Eliot's " Selected Prose" and " Selected Essays".
In this essay Eliot discusses some vital problems of literature in a sustained manner. The idea of tradition is germane to both Literary creation and Literary Criticism. He challenges the notion that a poet should be traced in proportion to his originality.
Apart from tradition a poet is a mere phantom. He cannot be understood. He must therefore flow in the main current of Literature.
"Tradition" does not mean a blind or timid adherence to the success of a former generation. It involves in the first place historical sense which we may call merely indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty fifth year.
#Relation between Tradition and Individual Talent:-
Individual talent does not cut himself away from the tradition. Tradition for Eliot is an already an existing monument and the individual can only marginally add a bit, extend a bit. According to Eliot Individual is adding a brick in the minarates. Tradition is not dead but a living thing and every new artist extends a bit in the tradition. And individual makes his/ her own place in the long history called tradition. At this time he is criticizing the Romantics because of their great deal of emphasis on individual. So Eliot was carrying a thread forward from Matthew Arnold that no individual has sense of his own, One has to compare with the best that is available. Thus Eliot explains the interdependence of the tradition and individual talent.
" Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquire essential history from the whole British museum."
#Three parts of this essay Tradition and Individual Talent
In English writing we seldom speak of Tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence, We cannot refer to " at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-So is " traditional" or even " too traditional".Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. It otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but it's own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its Creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of French; we only conclude that the French are " more critical" then we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticising our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else.
This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of the 20th century. The essay is divided into three main sections:
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the more well- known works that Eliot produced in his critic capacity.
The first gives us Eliot's Concept of tradition:
The second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry. And in
The third part he concludes the debate by saying that the poet's sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.
At the outset of the essay. Eliot asserts that the word ' tradition ' is not a very favourable term with the English who generally utilize the same as a term of censure. The English do not possess an orientation towards criticism as the French do, they praise a poet for those aspects of the work that are individualistic.
We cannot separate them from each other. Eliot says:
"There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet."
# Definition of Criticism and It's Ends:-
Eliot's views on criticism derive from his views on art and tradition as given above. He defines criticism as, " the commentation and exposition of works of art by means of written words". Criticism can never be an autotelic activity, because criticism is always about something. Art, as critics like Matthew Arnold point out, may have some other ends, e.g, moral, religious, Cultural, but art need not be aware of these ends, rather it performs it's function better by being indifferent to such ends. But criticism always has one and only one definite end, and that end is, "elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste. "
# Eliot's Dynamic Conception of Tradition:-
Eliot begins the essay by referring to certain views he had expressed in his earlier essay, Tradition and Individual Talent, because they are relevant to the present essay. In the earlier essay, he had pointed out that there is an intimate relation between the present and the past in the world of Literature. The entire Literature of Europe from Homer down to the present day, forms a single literary tradition, and it is in relation to this tradition that individual writers and individual works of art have their significance. This is so because the past is not dead, but lives on in the present. The past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. Past works of literature form an ideal order, but this ideal order is disturbed if ever so slightly, when a really new work of art appears. There is a readjustment of values, resulting in conformity between the old and the new Literary tradition is constantly changing and grow different from age to age.
# Literary Tradition: The Value of Conformity:-
The Literary tradition is the outside authority to which an artist in the present must own allegiance. He must constantly surrender and sacrifice himself in order to have meaning and significance. The true artists of any time form an ideal community, and artist in the present must achieve Spence of his community. He must realise that artists of all times are united together by a common cause and common inheritance. While a second rate artist assets his individuality because his distinction lies in the difference and not in similarity with others, the true artist tries to conform. He alone can " afford to collaborate, to exchange, to contribute".
Honest criticism and sensitive should be directed upon the poetry, not upon the poet.
# Theory of Depersonalization:-
" Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry."
#Limitations of essay:-
# Reference:-
Eliot, T.S.,The Use of poetry and the Use of Criticism", 1964 edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Preface.
# Conclusion:-
It seems that out side the Europe there was not tradition at all. He talks only about Homer means European Literary Tradition. And also not giving importance to the feminist literary tradition etc. And Harold Bloom also says it Anxiety of Influenceunder the influence of the great writer it becomes difficult to write for new poet. It harms his individual ability.
