Eliot Concept of Impersonality

          Introduction

Thomas Stearns Eliot is a key figure in the English modernist poetic tradition. His innovative style and influential critical essays helped to establish new attitudes to literature. They drew attention to tradition, the importance of continuity, and the role of objectivity. In rejecting the poetic values of the previous century, Eliot, along with Yeats and Pounds, was to set new poetic standards. 

Eliot's contribution to the English poetry tradition is significant. Eliot was no longer a man speaking to men as Wordsworth was, but a manipulator and creator of words and patterns. For Eliot, the high watermark of English poetry was the 17 century after which there was a steady decline which, he felt, had to be arrested by Eliot himself. 

      Concept of Impersonality

Objective (impersonal) and subjective (personal)  were imported in the English criticism from the post-Kantian German critic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A subjective (personal) work is one in which the author incorporates personal experiences, or projects into the narrative his or her personal disposition, judgement, values, and feelings. And objective (impersonal) work is one in which the author presents the invented situation or the fictional characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions and undertakes to remain detached and non committal. Through the techniques and through the allusions that indirectly comment on the present by reference to the past, Eliot is able to present his personal views without directly engaging in a personal expression of them.

T. S. Eliot remarks about poetry being " not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality". He propounds that a theory of poetry which views poetic process not as an externalization of a personal feelings, but as a complete surrender of personality. Eliot declares that "the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continuous extinction of personality". By appealing to "self -sacrifice" Eliot is being religious. 

He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. He had learned from the Imagists the necessity of clear and precise images, and he learned, too, from the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme and from his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound to fear romantic softness and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality as the important factor.

      The Artistic process

In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot states the new critical position on the relationship between the author and his or her work. The basis of Eliot argument is on analogy. He says that, the certain chemical reactions occur in the presence of a catalyst, an element that causes, but is not affected by, the reaction. The artistic process, according to Eliot, is a process of the depersonalization. In order to make the relationship between the process of depersonalization and tradition clearer Eliot gives us the example of a chemical reaction, a catalyst.

The creation of arts is like the action which takes place when a bit of finely affiliated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. The latter from sulphurous acid, in which there is no trace of platinum affected. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. Mind of the poet is this platinum. The emotions and feelings are oxygen and sulphur dioxide. The more perfect he is as a poet, the less involved is his own personality. The artist's mind keeps forming new compounds, but he remains separate in the whole process of creation. The man that suffers is different from the mind that creates.

  Tradition and Objective Corelative

Eliot's concepts of tradition and the objective co- relative are important aspects of his impersonal theory of poetry, which in itself is an important aspect of his classism. The theme of tradition is central both to his criticism and to his creative work. In his essay " Tradition and Individual Talent ", which has since been widely antholized, stand as an emblematic critical work of high modernism. Eliot saw the literary tradition as an evolving and transforming canon. He believed that the past, in the form of a literary tradition, informed and and enlivened the present and that individual writers of talent became a part of and transformed the tradition if they could create "the new work of art".

The view of the " Objective Correlative " places the emphasis squarely on the work as an artifact. The poet cannot transmit his emotions directly to the reader, and so takes recourse to some medium. This may be a situation, a set of objects or a chain of ideas. What the poet has to convey gets objectified through this medium, and hence, interaction between the poet and the reader takes place. The reader response to the medium, and through that, to the work of art. Eliot uses the dramatic monologue to characterize individuals in his poems, like Prufrock and Geronetion. The form has a dual function; it allows him to give a direct insight into character, but simultaneously act as a mask. He can thus externalize an  aspect of himself and represent a particular way of looking at experience without becoming subjective.

           Conclusion

Eliot's concept of impersonality is important in the literary process to reveal that the mind of the writer is like a receptacle in which are stored number of varied feelings, emotions and experiences. Poetic process is the process of fusing these desperate experiences and emotions into new wholes. The emotional and the intellectual, the creative and the critical faculties must work in harmony to produce really great work of art.