4.2.3 : Impersonality

In the second part of the essay Eliot argues that “Honest Criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”. This hints at the actual beginning of ‘New Criticism’ where the focus will shift from author to the text. Eliot here defines the poet’s responsibility. The poet is not supposed to compose poetry which is full of his personal emotions. He must subscribe himself to something more valuable, i.e., what others have composed in the past. Thus, Eliot emphasizes objectivity in poetry. Eliot believes that some sort of ‘physical distancing’, to use Bullough’s term, is necessary for successful composition. He also mentions that the poet has to merge his personality with the tradition:"The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." The mind of the poet is a medium in which experiences can enter new combinations. He exemplifies this process as when oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphuric acid. This combination takes place only in the presence of platinum, which acts as the catalyst. But the sulphuric acid shows no trace of platinum, and remains unaffected. The catalyst facilitates the chemical change, but does not participate in the chemical reaction, and remains unchanged. Eliot compares the mind of the poet to the shred of platinum, which will "digest and transmute the passions which are its material". He suggests the analogy of a catalyst’s role in a chemical process in a scientific laboratory for this process of depersonalization.

Eliot sees the poet's mind as "a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." He says that concepts like "sublimity", "greatness" or "intensity" of emotion are irrelevant. It is not the greatness of the emotion that matters, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure under which the artistic process takes place, that is important. In this way he dissociates the notion on the artistic process from an added emphasis on 'genius' and the exceptional mind.

Eliot refutes the idea that poetry is the expression of poet’s personality. Experiences in the life of the man may have no place in his poems, and vice-versa. The emotions occasioned by events in the personal life of the poet are not important. What matters is the emotion transmuted into poetry, the feelings expressed in the poetry. "Emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him". Eliot critiques Wordsworth's definition of  poetry in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility."For Eliot, poetry is not recollection of feeling, "it is a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences . . . it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation." Eliot defines that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." For him, the emotion of art is impersonal, and the artist can achieve this impersonality only by and being conscious of the tradition, He is talking about the poetic tradition and neglects the fact that even the poetic tradition is a complex mixture of written and oral poetry and the elements that go into them. It was only in his later writings that he realized that in poetic composition many elements are involved. In his poetic dramas, he sought to brodent his scope.

 Eliot has also ignored other traditions that go into social formations. In 'Religion and Literature', he has dealt with the non-poetic elements of tradition at length. He kept on developing his notion of tradition right up to the time he wrote ‘Notes towards a definition on culture’.