I hope to raise some questions about Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry. The questions concerning the role of the poet bespeak my confusion about my own role as a literary scholar (depending on whether or not I could find a job in the academic market). What roles do emotions, feelings, experiences play in the act of critique? To what extend are literary scholars bound up by or changing the tradition? What should literary scholars do when confronted with different traditions of criticism?
Eliot says that “the elements that enter the presence of the transformation catalyst are of two kinds: emotions and feelings,” and that “greater poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely.” Here Eliot claims that emotions and feelings are different, with feelings being on a superior level. But in many other places, he either uses them interchangeably or makes but a vague distinction between them. Then, what does Eliot exactly mean by emotion and feeling? What is, again, the difference between emotion, feeling, experience, and impression when he speaks of them in terms of artistic creation?
Second, Eliot deems futile the search for new human emotions and argues that the poet’s business to work ordinary ones anew. For Eliot, there exists a priori repertoire of emotions (not dissimilar to Maclntyre’s prior repertoire of virtues) that remains unchanged throughout human history. But is it the way to do justice to human psychology and human condition? Don’t new emotions emerge out of new experiences if emotions are products of experiences as Eliot seems to suggest in the essay? Or could it be the case that new emotions do arise but the existing vocabulary is inadequate to describe them, and that the use of old words blinds us to the insertion into the old repertoire new human emotions?
Third, Eliot uses the analogy of the catalyst to illustrate the role of the poet. He argues that just like the catalytic material that makes a chemical reaction happen more quickly without being changed itself, the poet’s mind is only a storage container for “numberless feelings, phrases, images” and a medium in which all these feelings, phrases, and images enter into new combinations. Impersonality, states Eliot, is the ideal state that the poet should strive towards. But is it true that an artistic work has nothing to do with the artist’s own emotions? It may be the case – and, in fact, it often happens – that an artist’s personal life is prosaic (prosaic in the common sense standard) but the emotions in his/her works are complex. But is it convincing to put forward the statement that an artist whose personal emotions are “simple, or crude, or flat” is capable of producing works of complex emotions. Here I’m thinking of the stream of consciousness school of writing. Doesn’t a poet fuse into new combinations of emotions some of his own? Further, if the poet’s business is to form existing phrases and images into different patterns, his “talent” is more technical than artistic. In addition, if the literary tradition is made up of different combinations, where does the first phrase and image come from?
Finally, Eliot talks about tradition from a temporal perspective. The literary tradition for him is that of Europe from Homer onwards; the whole order of European literature, or English literature, will undergo a process of readjustment with every introduction of a new work of art. If Eliot incorporates a geographical perspective into his discussion, will he still be confident to say that the world literary tradition is the European tradition and the European tradition is English literature? What will happen if literary traditions of different geographical areas meet? How would an artist react at the crossroads of several traditions when she/he has only the knowledge of one tradition?
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