Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” develops Arnold’s canonical views while extending the anti Romantic move away from subjective feeling. Bear in mind that we have moved forward in time about fifty years from Arnold and are now discussing twentieth-century criticism.
A. Eliot replaces the Romantic emphasis on spontaneity, originality, and novelty with a new focus on history, culture, and tradition.
1. Rather than break with the traditions of the past, great poets carry the past inside them as a living, timeless tradition that is ever contemporaneous.
2. They are conscious both of the pastness of the past and its presentness.
3. They realize that their own poetry only has full value when it is viewed within the context of all the poetry that has come before (the tradition).
4. Indeed they privilege “the mind of Europe” over their own individual minds, because their “historical sense” teaches them that, if they know more than the dead poets, it is only because the poets are what they know.
B. Eliot alters the expressivist belief that poetry is self-expression.
1. The poet is not the source of poetry but a site for the creative process.
2. He is a catalyst that facilitates the fusion of external emotions without himself being involved in the emotions or affected by the fusion.
3. Poetry, that is, is not the expression of a strong personality (as it was for the Romantics) but the “continual extinction of personality.”
4. It is an artistic process rather than a subjective perception: the poet is “a medium and not a
personality” (compare Keats’s negative capability).
5. The key to that process is not the creation of new emotions, but a fresh fusion of these emotions with objects, experiences, and states of feeling.
C. This artistic fusion (Eliot calls it a concentration)is expressed in a famous phrase from the essay “Hamlet and His Problems”: “objective correlative.”
1. An objective correlative is an external object, situation, or chain of events that parallels (correlates to) an internal emotion.
2. Because emotions cannot be perceived by the senses and are even difficult to express in language, the poet uses these physical objects and situations to externalize and concretize a heretofore internal and abstract emotion.
3. The poet functions as the site of this fusion of external and internal.
4. In the Iliad, Homer uses several objective correlatives to capture and express externally the internal rage of Achilles. For example, Achilles’ war cry (Book 18) causes a dozen Trojan soldiers to fall on their swords in terror.
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