Notes on T.S. Eliot's Early Criticism
Background | Central Assumptions | Key Terms | Analytical Methods | Limitations and Rebuttals/ Problems |Historical Legacy

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Background/ Context/

• Anti-Romanticism (Babbitt, Hulme)
• associates Romantics with his own, personal childhood (adolescence)
• associates it with emotionality (perhaps with women?)
• also associated with immaturity of thought: choatic (not ordered); self-absorbed, self-conscious, "ruminators"
• romanticism is associated with the cult of personality in poetry
• politically they are associated with liberalism, free love, atheism
• also they are associated with the Victorians, with his immediate poetic predecessors, the people he most rebels against.
WAYS THAT ELIOT REALLY IS AN HEIR TO ROMANTICISM DESPITE HIS SUPERFICIAL REEJECTION OF IT
• "impersonal" theory of poetry is really kind of like romantic notions of art for art's sake, negative capability
• idea that poetry is based on emotions and communicates emotions
• Coleridge's idea that the imagination reconciles opposite or discordant qualities
• Make it New (Pound)
• Symbolism
• Modernism
• World War I
• TIT is written one year after WWI starts; elitest insistence on tradition is an effort to re-cover the split/ chaos of the war., connect past with present

• "criticism is as inevitable as breathing "(TIT) -- thinking about poetry is perfectly natural; it's a good thing.
• critical vs. creative power -- trying to right the balance.  He thinks Engl Lit has been emphasizing the creative too much. (Comes from Arnold as well; Arnold too thought the Brits needed to recover from Romanticism by thinking more.)
• idea that literature is a whole; that all literature gets its meaning from how it fits into that context (historical sense--wide-ranging interconnectivity)
• connection between his critical theory and his poetic practice
• art imitates past art (public);  art imitates (expresses) emotions (private?) -->impersonal art emotions
• reader is supposed to pick up on the emotion that the writer expresses; but filtered through the context of tradition
• "emotion recollected in tranquility" NOT.  But then that IS his process.
• Mechanisms of denial
• impersonal theory of poetry.  Emotion of poetry is DIFFERENT from personal emotions
• catalyst image (scientific metaphor for the artist's disappearance)
• Work exists as a thing in itself, separate from the creator.
• Function of Criticism --
• to elucidate works of art (present facts that make it easier to understand them)
• to correct taste
• to make historical connections among works
• not to make psychological hypotheses about the author's life
• Historical Myth of the evolution of English Literature--  before Milton, poets had unified sensibilites; after MIlton, they separated feeling and thought.

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Key Terms

• TRADITION (TIT) -- all literature forms a simaltaneous whole.  Every new work had meaning only in the context of what came before, and it is capable of changing the past.
• OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE (HP) --  idea that there is some kind of link between the emotion and "fact" or public language, dressed up with a lot of pseudo-scientific jargon to make it sound important.  Shusterman sees this as coming out of Russell's philosophy of language (referential theory of language).
• FEELINGS/EMOTIONS (TIT) --  implied value judgement that feelings are less mature and structured than emotions. Meterer says that Bradley saw experience moving from sensation to feeling to emotion.  (sort like feelings are images and emotions are plots.  Freudian idea that feelings get connected to each other in a complex.)

  Limitations and Rebuttals/ Problems

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