The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot

         The critical work The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot (Chapter 3) provides some interesting information to better focus on the main themes of Eliot’s production and better understand his individual talent.

         In the first section of the text, Eliot’s obsession for unity and continuity is presented with reference to some of his essays.

Eliot believed that “racial and ethic heterogeneity marked the end of sociocultural harmony”. The idea was supported by Eliot’s personal experience as a citizen of multicultural societies (United States of America, London) and largely shared by Modernist artist, whose quest for unity was at the centre of their works of art. It followed that cultural disintegration together with the lack of coherence was a matter to worry about in Modernist culture.  As a result of the fragmentary nature of the present and his need of unity, Eliot looked back in the past and singled out Elizabethan England as an ideal period. According to him, it represented the high point of English civilization. In addition, he stated that traditions have to be conserved in order to give a culture its sense of continuity and wholeness and to give an individual the awareness of his/her identity in a community. Despite that, Eliot was horrified by the Nazi invocation of an Aryan nation and he disagreed with M. Arnold’s conception of culture as the framework of human life. Indeed, Eliot thought that only religion could guarantee the fundamental values for a culture, thanks to its institutions and traditions. Therefore, Christ became the model of the coexistence of material and spiritual in human society as well as in human beings.

Such an ideology had its consequences in arts and poetry, marking a considerable change from Romanticism. As the second section of the text explains, “Eliot challenged the dominant Romantic conception of art”, also sharing de Gourmount’s and Hulme’s ideas. He believed that poetry could not be only a projection of the individual personality, a self-expression, but it should be “impersonal”, thanks to the relevance of the medium. The objective correlative is a direct consequence of the aesthetical principle that is also linked to Eliot’s conservative social vision. What is more, Eliot and other contemporary artists promoted a new writing, representing a “countercultural modernism”, aimed at reinvigoration the classical inheritance as communicated by Dante’s literature. So, the “cultural breakdown” did not turn into a pessimistic conception of the narrative, since a new writing flourished. On the same level, Eliot considered Renaissance as the beginning of the separation between spiritual and material, that he called the “dissociation of sensibility”. In particular, J. Milton stood as the first poet portraying the cultural decline. Since he celebrated the desire for self-display, he adopted an eccentric language and created immature characters, he showed a ruined inner world. On the other hand, J. Donne was considered one of the last poets to exemplify the virtues of a unified sensibility.

The concept of “objective correlative” grounds Eliot’s conception of a proper use of the medium. It is theorized as the only way to express emotions adopting a coherent use of the language, so that balance between the form and the matter is created. In his critical essay Hamlet and his Problem, Eliot stated that in W. Shakespeare’s Hamlet a sense of imbalance and unreality is suggested. Such a result depended on the declined culture, in which Shakespeare lived. The context brought also him not to control the correlation between the emotional content and the dramatic form. Therefore, Eliot believed in the relevance of the context for a great work of art to be produced.

The third section of the text, called A sense of the past deals with Eliot’s idea of History and the consequences in the production of new works of art.

Similarly to Leopardi’s idea conveyed in La Ginestra, Eliot thought that History does not continuously progress: the advances in technology and improvements in lifestyle do not correspond to the moral or intellectual development. In A. Toynbee’s worlds, the production of wealth is not the production of well-being. The idea has also a philosophical background: different philosophers, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who believed in an irrational world, put Hegel’s philosophy into doubt.

All that said so far brings to Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, where he declared a fundamental aesthetical principle for the maintenance of order among texts. Every work of art has to be innovative with reference to tradition, so that it can be put in contrast and compare to the existing “monuments” of the ancestors.

         Eliot’s germinal ideas were fundamental for new critical theories and practices to arise in the twentieth century.