T.S. Eliot's views on the role and function of the Poet: (Tradition and Individual Talent)

While Eliot is most often known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary criticism. In this dual role, he acted as poet-critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is one of the more well known works that Eliot produced in his critic capacity. It formulates Eliot’s influential conception of the relationship between the poet and the preceding literary tradition.

       Eliot in this essay presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. Eliot says that in most of the criticisms, we find the name and the creativity of poet, but when we seek for enjoyment of poetry, we seldom get it. Eliot says that the difference between mature and immature poets can be found out by liberty of special and very varied feelings that can enter into new combinations.

            Eliot gives illustration from science-chemistry. In the process of being sulfurous acid, there are two gases needed: oxygen and sulfur dioxide. And also they must have the presence of filament ‘platinum’. He compares this platinum with the poet. In this whole process, filament of platinum plays vital and inevitable role. But yet that role is indirect. In the process, platinum remains quite unaffected by any gases. It remains inert, neutral and unchanged. Similarly, the result that comes out from the process has no trace of platinum. Eliot insists that the mind of the poet should be like that shred of platinum. It should give its total contribution in creating poetry, then also it should remain unaffected and separate when poetry has come out.

          Eliot explains very basic thing of his point that, what is expressed by the poet is merely a medium, not a personality. In this medium, the impressions and experiences come together in unusual and unexpected ways. He gives example from The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton. He puts some line from that without context to explain this point. Then he says that emotion in poetry remains very complex thing, and poet’s own personal emotion may be simple or flat. So every time poet’s own emotion cannot be taken place in poem. And if the poet is always looking for new emotion in poem, then it will be perverse. Eliot here twists ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. He says when a poet becomes personal while writing poetry, he will be considered a ‘bad poet’. Because he becomes unconscious, where he should be conscious and he becomes conscious where he must be unconscious. When a poet escapes from his personality, then and then the great poem comes out.