A Critical Study Of T.S. Eliot's Theory Of Order

A Critical Study of T. S. Eliot's Theory of Order—An Aspect of the Poetic Philosophy as my dissertation for the doctor's degree makes a close study of T.S. Eliot's Theory of Order from his philosophical theory to his poetry, religious belief, cultural phenomena, and sociological requirements as well as his creating writings, which form an integral order by themselves."Order"is, in Eliot's philosophy, a fairly complex and contradictory notion; but it's a key clue for us to getting a clear understanding of these subjects in Eliot's eye."Order"starts from his childhood's mystical hallucination:"the betrothal of Miss End and Mr. Front"and"the elopement of Mr. Up and Miss Down"to his mature thought:"The way up and the way down are one; the way forward and the way backward are one"(CP, Four Quartets 189);"And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back"(CP, The Dry Salvages 210);"What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning". Eliot's theory of order was formally initiated in his dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, for the doctor's degree and, later, was interwoven into his poetic and dramatic criticism, and his writing as well. Eliot's theory of order is a problem of metaphysical philosophy and religion, and it also displays a process of his poetry and creating. Eliot has sought with diligence between"thinking"and"poetry""a universal order"from philosophical order to poetic order, religious order to ethical order, cultural order to sociological order, and from secular order to sacred order.This dissertation goes along from the philosophical perspective with the dialogues between the opposite pairs as well as the congruous pairs, which are not superficial conversations but imply Eliot's"painfully dark work"and"the painful task of unifying jarring and incompatible ones [worlds]"for"a universal order"; for"the life of soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world". Eliot's poetry commits the crisis of modern philosophy, tries to get back the traditional life view for the modern people, and constructs an idealistic and artistic social order for them, which is just as what Leavis says—"The origins of the dominant Anglo-American traditions of criticism in the mid-twentieth are of course complex…. And philosophy and religion would be'replaced by poetry'in modern society…and the single most influential common figure…was the American poet, dramatist and critic, T. S. Eliot". Besides, Eliot uses his own poetics and his own experience of life to build up a meaningful world where we can reach an ultimate enlightenment from his works the moment we read them, feeling our life beaming with the rose:"A condition of complete simplicity/…And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire/ And the fire and the rose are one". Furthermore, Eliot tries to reconstruct the reunion of the spiritual world with intelligence, wisdom, and tradition, and to get back the way of the primitive existence:"humility is the first and most complete incarnation…and the sign of wisdom".In order to get a panoramic point of view of"order", this dissertation traces back to the origin of Eliot's"tradition","impersonality","objective correlatives", and"the unification of sensibility"as well as the other writers, philosophers, literary critics, and anthropologists who have had great influence upon his career, thus, finding out order of four aspects in Eliot:"the order from the philosophical perspective"embodying epistemological and methodological patterns","the order from the poetic perspective"containing linguistic and psychological patterns,"the order from the cultural perspective"covering religious, ethical, and cultural patterns, and"the order from the sociological perspective"enfolding four dialogues, in which all the opposites And concords are unified in and attached to a higher finite center with intellectual dimension and traditional value.There are six chapters including the introduction and the conclusion. In Chapter One, there are five points, the first of which points out three misunderstandings of Eliot, the first two of which are that most people are likely to think that"impersonality"and"objective correlative"were first put forward by Eliot in"Tradition and the Individual Talent", and"Hamlet and His Problems", and the third of which is that the two theories are simply regarded as Eliot's poetic criticism and merely regarded as the influence of the French Symbolist, Baudelaire's"correspondences"and the English Romanticist, John Keats'"negative capacity". Actually, besides"impersonality"and"objective correlative", Eliot stressed the importance of"intellect", the concord of"rationality"and"irrationality", and"the unification of sensibility"; but all of the notions are first posed by Plato for the argument of his"idealism"—the object of the intellect is eidos (idea), which was improved by Aristotle, one of his students, in his Posterior Analytics, which Eliot made a close-reading when he was a student at Harvard University. And he employed these philosophical terms first into his dissertation and then skillfully into his poetry.There are three major reasons for people's misunderstanding of Eliot, the first of which is that people simply regard him as a poet and critic, and the second of which is that people only read his literary criticism and verses written ever since he came to England in 1914, because they know little about his dissertation and his presentations at the seminars at Harvard. The third is that Eliot's dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and some important monographs in culture like After the Strange Gods, Essays Ancient and Modern, The Idea of a Christian Society, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, To Criticize the Critics and Other Writings, and his presentations in philosophy at the seminars at Harvard haven't yet been translated into Chinese. Eliot's literary criticism and creative writings since 1914 when he came to England help to make people believe that he is simply a literary critic and poet.Actually, Eliot's thought itself is"an organic order"of philosophy, poetry, religion, and sociology, in which philosophy is both the base of and the guide to his success in his writing and literary criticism. Though he is well-known for his writing and literary criticism, Eliot cannot be ignored as a real philosopher; for he has explored the unique value of philosophy from poetry and religion. It's no wonder that"Eliot is always ready to call his doctrine as a poet's philosophy"(Abel 2006). Eliot specializes in philosophical science during his study for the master's degree and the doctor's degree; and in the course of it, he attended quite a few distinguished philosophers'classes like Bergson's, Bertrand Russell's, Harold Joachism's, Josiah Royce's, James Haughton Woods', and Charles Lanman's, and read Plato, Aristotle, Irving Babbitt, RenéDescartes, Hegel, Kant, Bradley, Martin Heidergger, and Frazer, among whom, Plato, Aristotle, Russell, Bradley, Bergson, and Frazer have the greatest influence upon him and have been, in turn, reflected in his thought which has been seeking for"a universal order"in which the spiritually distorted people can settle their life and soul in ideology. Eliot's theory of order is reflected as well as improved in his plays and verses like Rhapsody on a Windy Night, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday, Four Quartets, The Family Reunion, and A Dedication to My Wife; that's the reason why Eliot holds that"the poet's theories should arise out of his practice rather than his practice out of his theories".The second and the third points are concerned with Eliot's social position as a philosopher and the research work about the relationship between Eliot's philosophy and poetry, and the relationship between his philosophy and poetry, and his creative writings. Eliot has already been recognized as a philosopher, but, generally, a monist in the West. Besides some fragmentary studies, there have been four monographs about his philosophical thought: Freed's T. S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher (1979) which asserts that Eliot's philosophical ideas and critical prose are derived from Bradley's metaphysics:"Bradley is the way to understand Eliot"(Freed xvii). Skaff's The Philosophy of T. S. Eliot (1986) has examined how Eliot goes from a skeptic to a surrealist poet, saying that"T. S. Eliot is the first poet since Coleridge to have constructed a comprehensive philosophical system out of eclectic sources and then to have allowed those ideas to determine the nature of his verse and his principles of literary criticism, and to influence even the conduct of his personal life"(Skaff 3); and Shusterman's T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (1988) which reverses Freed's affirmation of Bradley's influence upon Eliot insists that Eliot should be a beneficiary of Russell's analytical philosophy and Aristotle's intelligent mind (Shusterman 9). Manju Jain makes a close study of T. S. Eliot's Harvard years and"traces the genesis of his major literary, religious and intellectual preoccupations in his early work as a student of philosophy, and explores its influence on his poetic and critical practice"(Jain Preface). Jain also offers answers to the questions of why Eliot failed to find satisfaction in an academic career devoted to philosophy and why he gave up the speculations of metaphysics for the dogmas of theology. Finally, Jain offers some insights into Eliot's early years as an important philosophical source for his poetry and critical thought (Jain xii). All of the achievements about Eliot's theory, especially about his philosophical ideas inspired my dissertation which is, on the contrary, trying to demonstrate how Eliot, as a pluralist, plants the opposite pairs like"subjectivity and objectivity","personality and impersonality","inner and outer","death and birth", and"the secular and the sacred", etc. in a unity.In China, there are also some relative researches but no monographs about Eliot's poetic philosophy. In"Eliot in the West― Eliot's Research Records (1995)", Professor Zhang Jian, Expert of T. S. Eliot in Beijing Foreign Language Studies University, draws a conclusion about Eliot's research in our country, saying that in the first half of the 20th century, Eliot's poems were studied, and in the later half of the 20th century, his poetic theories and cultural phenomena were researched (Zhang Jian 118-126). Actually, we've already gone into Eliot's philosophy or his philosophical influence upon his poetry and writing. For example, in"Time Code of Four Quartets― Between Change and Eternity (1993)", Shi Chengfang, Doctorate Graduate of Beijing University in 1997, fused Herakleitos and New-Platoism in Eliot's view of time (Shi Chengfang 76-83). In"The Epistemological Change of Poetic Order The Waste Land (1996)", Xu Wenbo, Professor of Shenzhen University, supplied us with a way to enjoy the writing technique of The Waste land from the epistemological point of view (Xu Wenbo 16-21). In"A Study of the Time of Eliot's Four Quartets (1998)", Jiang Hongxing, Professor of Hunan Normal University, makes a study of"time"from both philosophical and religious perspectives (Jiang Hongxing 76-81). In"T. S. Eliot: Genius Who Has Changed the Way of Expression (1999)", Lu Jiande, Professor of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, gives us a hint that Eliot's poetry embodies philosophical thought (Lu Jiande 47-56). In"T. S. Eliot: Meditation upon Time (2002)", Zhang Ziqing, Professor of Nanjing University, puts emphasis on the relationship between past, present and future reflected in the Four Quartets (Zhang Ziqing 54-55). In"A Study of the Quotations of Four Quartets (2002)", Liu Lihui, Professor of Southwest University, gives a rational analysis of Eliot's view of Christian Logos and poetic philosophy, and expounds how they come together naturally and intellectually in a consummate order in the Four Quartets (Liu Lihui,"A Study of the Quotations of Four Quartets,"106-112); in another paper called"The Stylistic Features of Four quartets (2004)", Professor Liu also gives a slight touch of Eliot's philosophical influence upon his poetics (Liu Lihui"The Stylistic Features of Four quartets,"56-58). In Pioneer of Modern Criticism― A Study of T. S. Eliot's Poetics (2005), Liu Yan, Professor of Beijing International Studies University, makes a close study of Eliot's poetic theory which also ranges into Eliot's moral, religious, philosophical and sociological thought. (Liu Yan 4-5). My paper,"A Study of T. S. Eliot's Theory of Order (2002)"gives an initial discussion about how Eliot keeps a literary order both in theory and writing, and how we can find"a universal order"where we can live both physically and mentally (Jiang Yujiao"A Study of T. S. Eliot's Theory of Order,"61-63); another one,"A Study of Ontology of Eliot's Self-Consciousness (2005)"is a further study of Eliot's philosophy ( Jiang Yujiao"A Study of Ontology of Eliot's Self-Consciousness,"105-108). The dissertation on Eliot's Order of Theory is the continuation and furtherance of these achievements.The fourth point is about the necessity of this research work. Of course, it is worth studying Eliot's theory of order. First, it can help people to dissolve the misunderstandings which resulted from their bias towards Eliot's"impersonality"and"objective correlative"; for example, they maintain that Eliot is a monist of"impersonality"and"objectivity", an advocate of"classicism"and opponent of"romanticism". So, this research will tell us that"impersonality"and"objective correlative"are simply the basic requirements for writing verses; but Eliot's aim of these two theories is to establish a universally eternal order in which"personality"and"impersonality","rationality"and"irrationality","subjectivity"and"objectivity","romanticism"and"classicism","religion"and"society","individual"and"community","God"and"man","death"and"life","past"and"future"get along well with each other and are unified as"an organic whole". Thus, at the same time, Eliot has offered an intelligent order to this crazy, chaotic, disorderly society; and what's more important is that the separation of"subjectivity"from"objectivity"in the Western philosophical history is fused. Eliot's order is ideological and metaphysical.Chapter Two,"Eliot's Order from the Philosophical Perspective", embodies two patterns: epistemological and methodological. The epistemological point of view traces Eliot's notions of"objectivity"and"objective correlative"from his later prose on poetry to his early seminars and dissertation on philosophy, expounding how he unifies"subjectivity"with"objectivity","past"with"present","inner"with"outer", and"reality"with"ideality"in a metaphysical order of epistemology. To Eliot, feeling, impression, and memory are all felt objects that can integrate"subjectivity"and"objectivity"into an order in which"subjectivity"is a kind of"objective"subjectivity; and"objectivity","subjective"objectivity. Besides, a poet's"world"is a finite center which is the unity of feeling in which subject and object are a fusion of sensory experience and intelligence in a great work of art. Eliot has been hunting for the object to unify the"inner"world with the"outer"world, thus, covering the limited personal emotions. Besides, to Eliot, when the inner unrest and outer impact go into relations by feeling and transmuting of the object,"the coincidence of inner unrest and outer impact"propels"the immediate unity of a psychical finite center"(KE 15-16). Having benefited from Royce's idealism and Bradley's Absolute as well as Plato's view of"idea"and Aristotle's view of"concept", Eliot maintains that"reality"and"ideality""ultimately coincide in epistemology"in"the finite center". The idea with which this reality is qualified is itself real; on the other hand, the reality to which it refers is an ideal reality, the nature of which is one unified whole, composed of various appearances of the world; but it depends on thought for its existence,"for the world is completely real or completely ideal". Though he is greatly influenced by their thought, Eliot is a little different from them: he is not a monistic idealist but a pluralistic one who just seeks for the unity of the"reality and ideality". In the unification of"time", Eliot resembles Bergson's"memory", the personal unconscious which evolves from his concept of the timeless duration― any perception that we experience in the present is composed of past sensations which are brought to the conscious range by memory by the process of association, which is also the process of the forming of the racial memory from the individual unconscious to the collective-historical unconscious, during which"past"and"future"orient"present"as a finite center, making the order of the cycle of time.The methodological point of view expounds how the opposites of"personality"and"impersonality","rationality"and"irrationality", and"classicism"and"romanticism", and the consort of"criticism"and"aestheticism"are intrinsically unified in the finite center, correcting some people's one-sided understanding of Eliot's"impersonality"as a single-minded"impersonal"monist, and making a further exploration to Professor Liu Yan's thought that"Eliot advocates the existing of pluralism", and also"advocates establishing an ideological order in which all the conflicts will be resolved and reconciled through'the dialectic unity'". Eliot transmuted personal experience into something impersonal and unfamiliar by employing the conscious experience to express an unconscious tendency rather than a private emotion― the kind of"personality", with its coherence, which moves beyond the merely subjective to the universality and the unification of the impersonal unconscious of the finite center. Besides, to Eliot, the emotion in experience is personal or irrational while the emotion in the writing must be impersonal and rational; therefore, the irrational disordered emotions ought to be transformed into the rational and impersonal emotion of the poem. That's to say, personal feelings should be transmuted into social experience or poeticized into artistic effect, thus, becoming common sense and being of intelligence. That's the reason why we cannot feel Eliot's own emotions when we read his works. As for the conformity of"aesthetic ideals"and"criticism function", Eliot holds that aesthetic ideals should be in pursuit of order, logic, harmony, restrained emotion, and"proper pleasure", which is just like what Confucian says:"乐而不淫,哀而不伤"; and Eliot also insists that aesthetic ideals should be in conformity with literary and religious belief, so it's not a kind of ecstasy but a kind of restrained pleasure. For Eliot, critical functions should be in pursuit of objectified feeling, objectified subjectivity, and depersonalized personality, both of which are with the same aim to reach an intellectual dimension. Eliot is not of so much Classicism or not of so much resistance to Romanticism as he has been spoken of, especially in our country; on the contrary, he placed the"outer voice"and the"inner voice"into an intellectual synthesis which overcomes and reconciles the collective rationality of Classicism and the individual irrationality of Romanticism in the finite center. Conclusively, Eliot's thought of fusing the opposites together, having benefited from Russell's philosophy:"There is unity in the world, but it is a unity formed by the combination of opposites.'All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things'; but the many have less reality than the one, which is God".Chapter Three,"T. S. Eliot's Order from the Poetic Perspective", includes two patterns: linguistic and psychological. The former lays special emphasis on the unifications of"words"and"ideas", and"words"and"meanings", in the former of which abstract ideas require to be reified by concrete words; as a result, both words and ideas are objectified and intellectualized in the finite center in conformity with each other in the sensory experience. Then, when we read the verse, we can feel"the intellect was [is] immediately at the tips of the senses", and"feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose", which is the presentation of"the fusion of the intension and the extension"in poetry. Actually, Eliot is using Aristotle's philosophical thought about"Induction"which is introduced in Posterior Analytics to"generalize the concrete ideas in poetry as a methodology to realize the combination of the abstract and the concrete". The latter unity refers to the unity of words and meanings in which Eliot emphasizes the importance and superiority of the precise, clear, particular, and definite meaning of the word, and"deplores the vague, general, and indefinite not only in literary [poetic] criticism but also in literature [poetry] itself"(SW 78), because the vague and indefinite meanings will make"the language dead". The meanings of words have their succession in the contexts of literary history; and they interpenetrate each other and give significance to each other, forming an order of the whole literature and making language alive forever; if a precise meaning can be found for the word,"this meaning may occasionally represent a virtue""in the light of Christian ethics". Apart from that, the changing of the contexts brings to"the extension of the meanings of the word"; and it is their changes in meaning that keep a language alive"(TCC 74). If meaning depends on context, it follows that a text in principle has no fixed meaning, which"keeps the expansion of the meaning of the vocabulary and the order of the renewing language"(Shusterman 125). Philosophy should be like poetry in which thought must be intellectualized and objectified; for"Philosophy and poetry that are'verbal,'that use words that have no concrete referent, can be neither clear nor precise because they are out of touch with the real world". A poet's or a philosopher's"world"is the finite center (Eliot quotes the term from Bradley [KE 141]) which displays the kind of precision and seeks the unity of intelligence and emotion in the sensory experience in philosophy and poetry.The psychological point of view is the continuation and furtherance of the linguistic point of view. It first demonstrates how"the word"and"the object"come together, and then, how"the object"and"the sensation"are transfused, and finally, how"emotion"and"intelligence"are associated with each other. To Eliot,"the word"is the symbol of the thought of emotion; the thought of emotion, the symbol of"the object"."The word"and"the object"are independent of the thought of emotion, but the thought cannot be independent of them. And it's the underlying implication of"the object's"symbolic function that unifies"the word"and"the object". Everything depends on sensation, starting with it and returning to it. Namely, the object stimulates sense; the sense responds, gains, and passes information to sensation; the sensation digests and passes the information to sensibility which transmutes the information into thought, imagination or emotion, the process of which is"feeling"which makes them"highly intellectualized in the activities"as"the immediate unity of a finite psychical center". We can enjoy Eliot's thought much in Bradley's"finite center"and a little in Plato's"association of ideas". The unification of sensibility refers to the unification of thought and emotions, ideas and intelligence, rationality and sensations; and in the"unified sensibility", intelligence operates within this whole, in the elaboration and articulation of the whole― the making explicit of what was implicit in the order of psychological activities, directly into the"ethic dimension"in the psychical idea for the order of society.Chapter Four,"Eliot's Order from the Cultural Perspective", embraces three patterns: religious, ethical, and cultural. Eliot's religious initiation, development, and maturity goes from mysticism affected by his mother's poetry in his childhood to skepticism affected by his teachers'thought during his early years'studies at Harvard in America, at Sorbonne in France, and at Oxford in England where he had sought some philosophical and religious methods to integrate his mystical"moments"and skeptical"asceticism"into an intellectual dimension, in which poetry reveals a number of attempts to express mystical moments of varying intensity, clarity, and illumination, which Eliot, later, has settled down"in the Rose-Garden":"Footfalls echo in the memory/…. Into the rose-garden/…. Inhabit the garden/…. To be conscious is not to be in time/ But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden/…. Only through time time is conquered". Philosophy has found some intellectual system which explains and validates these mystical moments by integrating them into a comprehensive view of the world; and religion keeps them an unconscious structure which, in turn, embodies and unifies all kinds of belief, and in which God places all the components of the world including human beings into a harmonious order which is felt in the immediate experience. Eliot fused Bradley's philosophical thought that"the Absolute is immanent in finite centers"into his religious belief—Incarnation is a finite center in which opposites of different kinds are intellectually unified". Besides, Eliot holds that God, the infinite unity, is like man,"a thinking and feeling being"who has a"private personality"; thus, man, as the finite objects of appearance in the unity of immediate experience, is capable of entering into a"relation"with God by"Incarnation"."Nature"is the creation by God who, in return, operates and protects its nature and its values which cannot be imposed or deformed by man with material power. Man must be"in conformity with nature…as well as in better conformity with the Will of God". Consequently, we can enjoy the durable or eternal order of the society, and"the natural conformity of man and Nature"—"A condition of complete simplicity". Philosophically, to Eliot, our minds do not refer to the individual but to the collective minds of the unconscious accumulation from our ancestors and the Nature. Only when man respects the Nature, can man and the Nature be of"one meaning"as objects in the finite center of the Nature in the immediate experience. Moreover, Eliot's being of"a catholic cast of mind, a calvinistic heritage, and a puritanical temperament","Greek Gods'tacts", and also"Hinduism meditation","Buddhist enlightenment", and"Confucian's wisdom"as a kind of"humanism", embodying the wisdom of the collective-historical unconsciousness makes great impulse upon his sense of unification of the religions in epistemology in service of the society. As for the fusion of"the fire and the soul", Eliot argues that when people's desire and sensations are burned in the"fire","The fire and the rose are one". The fire and the rose are so transfused that one is absorbed into the other, as they would be in the Absolute― The soul and the body are one; for the rose is the symbol of"the soul life"; and"the life of a soul…consist…in the painful task of unifying jarring and incompatible ones, and passing…from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher [finite center] which shall somehow include and transmute them"into an order which is beheld by Eliot as the"crowned knot of fire"which suggests the"knot"of the universe, crowned by the Trinity of the Soul, the Body, and the Fire which"declare/ The one discharge from sin and error"(KE 148; CP, Little Gidding 221); and"Sin is behovely, but/ All shall be well"(CP, Little Gidding 219). Eliot's thought of this sort is practiced in The Waste Land, and improved in the Four Quartets. In regard with"birth"and"death", Eliot's following suit of Frazer's"death-rebirth pattern"and the Wisdom of the East, the believing of"reincarnation"indicate an order of sociological continuation with the collective-historical unconsciousness; therefore, to sum up, Eliot's religious belief begins, progresses, and matures with his philosophical thought.The ethical aspect mainly explores Eliot's point of view towards"wisdom", which unifies philosophy, poetry, and religion into one. To Eliot, poetry should provide people with wisdom and carry out the duty of ethical instruction. Great poets are geniuses and wise men who should inherit the wisdom that has been accumulated timelessly and unconsciously from their forefathers; for wisdom is"a kind of virtue, a kind of charity, humility", and also"a kind of intuition for understanding the nature of living things and the nature of the human heart". So, only great poets who have"a very wide range of interest, sympathy, and understanding"can lay wisdom in"a fundamental unity""on intelligence and experience", and carry out the duty of morality. Eliot's thought of this regard benefits from Aristotle who advocates that"intelligence"should be developed by moral virtue to the level of gaining true wisdom, aiming to serve the order of the society. Aristotle conceives of phronesis (practical wisdom) as productive of truth and pragmatism, the former of which, in his sense, refers to what is good for human beings, and the latter of which is something of a virtue or spiritual criterion in the hope of keeping the order of the society. Therefore, in Eliot's eye,"A really satisfactory working philosophy of social action…requires not merely science but wisdom". Besides, Eliot refers to"humility"as a kind of belief in God, a kind of religious supernatural wisdom, a major factor of which our life is made up, and a fundamental virtue that man should own."Humility"and"wisdom"are congruent with each other for the purpose of inculcating people and purify their soul through experience for a universal order. It is no wonder that Eliot repeated the importance of inculcating moral sense, saying that"the absence of any moral sense"means"the absence of social sense".The cultural aspect consists of six dialogues which interact on and conform to each other. The first dialogue discusses how tradition and time keeps with each other conformity in which tradition changes with time and improves with new ideas'joining in the past ones, and individual's joining communities', as is concluded by Eliot as:"Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and liberating". The second one explains how language and tradition interact on and shape each other, thus, forming a consensual community in which language depends upon a shared form of life, communal practices and customs which extend with continuity and regularity over time― in short, upon tradition whose consensual community both requires and is required by language, which is as what Hans-Georg Gadamer (German 1900-2002) says,"All forms of human community of life are forms of linguistic community". Besides, the prime social function of poetry is the propellant of the progression of tradition; and its direct duty is to preserve, and to restore the beauty of the language, and also to develop it; consequently, it places tradition and language in an order. The third expounds the relationship between objectivity and tradition, in which poetry must store tradition and tradition must embody intelligence which requires that poetry be objectified and depersonalized in order to keep a cultural order between the living poets and the dead ones; besides, the sense of impersonality is at the heart of Eliot's advocacy of poetic impersonality and objectivity through adherence to tradition; and Eliot's treatment of objectivity in"Tradition and the Individual Talent", which centers on the impersonal theory of poetry begins with an attempt to base poetic objectivity and impersonality on the idea of...