The Theorist And The Poet

T.S.Eliot, one of the most influential American poets in the twentieth century, was also one of the major critics of his time. As a matter of fact, it is through his critical essays that Eliot established his new anti-Romantic poetic theory and thus laid the theoretical foundations for the composition and reception of his poetry. In his most well-known essay,"Tradition and the Individual Talent,"Eliot proposes and elaborates his highly influential impersonal theory. At the outset of his essay, he emphasizes the significance of tradition, pointing out that the best and even the most individualistic parts of a poem are those in which the immortality of the dead poets reveals most vigorously. He believes that in order to acquire tradition, a poet has to be equipped with a historical sense, perceiving at once the pastness of the past and its presence, for no poet has his complete significance alone. The sense of tradition is to be gained by a poet through a continual extinction of personality. Then Eliot focuses his attention on the relationship between a poet and his works, describing the poetic process by an analogy with a chemical reaction, in which the mind of a poet serves as a catalyst to force feelings, phrases, and images into a new compound. Thus a poet ought to be able to separate in his writing of a poem the mind which creates from the man who experiences. For him poetry is an escape from emotion and from personality, not the opposite. Eliot's poetry is naturally the reflection and application of his impersonal theory. However, some critics have already noticed the traces of"personality"in his early poems, and even in his greatest piece, The Waste Land. Though diverse critics have given their expositions and offered their explanations concerning this issue, it lacks comprehensive and systematic investigation and analysis.To make clear the possible causes of this disparity between theory and practice, this thesis is, first, to make a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the impersonal theory and, then, to examine the personal elements revealed in his poetry. These efforts will demonstrate that although Eliot attempted and virtually succeeded in a great part in avoiding the expression of his personal emotions and personality in his poetry, it is inevitable for a poet to reveal his emotions and personality in his writings and they cannot be removed thoroughly and completely from his verse, just as Eliot's own poetic creation does. Eliot's poetry is in this sense not a victory of the impersonal over the personal, but instead ought to be regarded as an organic unity of the two. On the one hand, we have to acknowledge that Eliot's theory of impersonality along with his poetry based upon it helped the emergence of a new poetry, and thereby altered people's view on poetry and changed the evaluating standards for poetry, influencing the composition of poetry afterwards; on the other, we have to recognize that there are links between Eliot's emotions and experiences and his creation of poetry. As a result, we cannot ignore the influence of Eliot's personal experiences upon his creative writing, when trying to interpret and analyze it.