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T. S. Eliot's Theory of Personal Expression
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Eliot's statement in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry is “an escape from personality” seems to support the widely held belief that his theory of poetry is impersonal. Cleanth Brooks, for example, cites this passage and remarks that Eliot asserts, “with almost shocking emphasis,” that the poem does not express personality. On the other hand, a number of writers on Eliot have argued that his theory involves personal expression, basing their arguments on statements in which Eliot recommends or praises the poet's revelation of self. The evidence, I believe, clearly supports this interpretation, or more precisely, the interpretation that Eliot's theory is one of indirect personal expression. My purpose is to analyze Eliot's theory, to examine how the poem, in Eliot's view, expresses personality, and how this expression affects his standard of esthetic value.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966
References
1 Selected Essays, new ed. (New York, 1950), p. 10—hereafter cited in the text as SE.
2 Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), p. 664.
3 C. S. Lewis, in a polemic against E. M. W. Tillyard, cites Eliot as an important critic who believes that poetry is personal expression. Tillyard, in his answer to Lewis, suggests that Eliot's theory of impersonality is a theory of disguised self-expression: “The more the poet experiences this abandonment of personality, the more likely is the reader to hail the poet's characteristic, unmistakable self”—The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (London, 1939), pp. 3, 31, 36, 39–40.
Eliseo Vivas in an article on Eliot's objective correlative deplores Eliot's concept of poetry as the expression of emotion; and Murray Krieger in a book on contemporary criticism characterizes Eliot's theory as a combination of expression and impersonality—“The Objective Correlative of T. S. Eliot,” in Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1949), pp. 389–400; The New Apologists for Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1963), pp. 46–56.
René Wellek distinguishes between Eliot's theory and practice. Wellek states that Eliot's concept of impersonality means “that poetry is not a direct transcript of experience. However, it does not mean that poetry is devoid of personal, physiognomic characteristics: otherwise we could not distinguish between the works of different authors and could not speak of a ‘Shakespearian’ or ‘Keatsian’ quality.” Wellek adds that Eliot's actual “criticism is very often based on a standard of personality which is not, of course, the anecdotal personality but the personality pattern emerging from the work itself”—“The Criticism of T. S. Eliot,” SR, lxiv (Summer 1956), 406–407.
4 The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), p. 227.
5 Eliot's formula (SE, pp. 7–8) is that oxygen (emotions) and sulphur dioxide (feelings) mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum (the poet's mind) produce sulphurous acid (the art work). The central point of the analogue is the separation of the “man who suffers” from the mind of the poet. As the chemical action of the analogue implies, Eliot emphasizes the associative power of the imagination (or what he designates as the mind's “saturation” in images, which are unified by a basic emotion), arguing that Coleridge undervalues the function of memory, the power to recall images (Use of Poetry, pp. 147–148, 78, 42).
6 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), p. 79—hereafter cited in the text.
7 “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets, Noonday ed. (New York, 1961), p. 107—hereafter cited in the text as TVP.
8 Introduction, Selected Poems by Marianne Moore (New York, 1935), p. xi.
9 Introduction, Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London, 1928), p. xviii. Ants Oras, basing his analysis on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Eliot's Introduction to Pound, gives an account of Eliot's concept of the creative process in The Critical Ideas of T. S. Eliot (Tartu, 1932), pp. 12–13.
10 The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 241, 145.
11 The Sacred Wood, 7th ed. (London, 1950), p. x.
12 Theory of Literature (New York, 1942), p. 73.
13 “Byron,” in From Anne to Victoria, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London, 1937), p. 614.
14 When a critic discovers personality in a work, his interpretation requires the same type of substantiation as the verification of meaning—the examination of the relationship between text and author. Although a work is polysemous, possessing a life of its own as well as a life related to the author, the critic's analysis of the author-text relationship contributes to an understanding and evaluation of the text. If there is a contradiction between text and author, the critic should show how the work's pattern of action abrogates the author's usual meanings. For example, Babbitt's pattern of action reveals a contradiction between the bitterness of the text and Lewis' stated sympathy with the Babbitt-world, but even so, an examination of Lewis' biography and personality helps to illuminate the nature of this bitterness—Lewis' angry, bewildered condemnation paralleling the bewilderment of a world that cannot possibly know itself.
The integral relationship between meaning and author is persuasively argued by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in “Objective Interpretation,” PMLA, lxxv (Sept. 1960), 463–479, and by Leon Edel, in Literary Biography (New York, 1959), who also maintains that the relationship between biography and text plays a role in the evaluation of a work.
15 “John Milton,” English Institute Essays 1946 (New York, 1947), p. 15. Edel applies Bush's statement to Samson's blindness (Literary Biography, p. 62).
16 The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 227–228.