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Eliot refers to this organic tradition, this developing canon, as the "mind of Europe." The private mind is subsumed by this more massive one. This leads to Eliot's so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of ...
Poetic tradition is a concept similar to that of the poetic or literary canon (a body of works of significant literary merit, instrumental in shaping Western culture and modes of thought). The concept of poetic tradition has been commonly used as a part of historical literary criticism, in which a poet or author is evaluated in the context of ...
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright. [1] He was a leading figure in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated the art through the use of language, writing style, and verse structure.
Selected Essays, 1917–1932 is a collection of prose and literary criticism by T. S. Eliot. Eliot's work fundamentally changed literary thinking and Selected Essays provides both an overview and an in-depth examination of his theory. [1] It was published in 1932 by his employers, Faber & Faber, costing 12/6 (2009: £32). [2]
Eliot, later on in his career, was challenged with the thought that the dissociation within literature had been caused by the English Civil War in the mid 17th century. He did not agree or disagree to this theory but rather stated "cryptically that he thought it might have been caused by the same factors as those which brought about the Civil War".
Topics include Eliot's opinions of many literary works and authors, including William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and the poets Dante Alighieri and William Blake. [1] One of his most important prose works, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which was originally published in two parts in The Egoist, is a part of The Sacred Wood.
Eliot uses Lady Macbeth's state of mind as an example of the successful objective correlative: "The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion….", as a contrast to Hamlet. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him.
The evaluation of Eliot's criticism occurred relatively early; for example, an appraisal of his work focusing exclusively on Eliot the critic (as opposed to Eliot the poet) appeared in 1941 in a book by John Crowe Ransom. Ransom, participating in the New Critical tradition of borrowing from Eliot, writes that