THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM – T.S.ELIOT

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM – T.S.ELIOT   (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot is a poet- critic like Dryden, Dr.Johnson, Coleridge, etc. He  has an important place in the New criticism. In 1928 Eliot declared himself to be “ a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion”. He was strong supporter of order and discipline, of authority and tradition and of organization and pattern. His chief critical works are The Sacred Wood (1921), Homage to John Dryden (1924), For Lancelot Andrews (1928), Selected Essays (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Elizabethan Essays (1934), Essays Ancient and Modern(1936)

    The essay Function of Criticism 1923, arose out of a controversy. Eliot’s essay Tradition and Individual Talent was published in 1919. Murry challenged the opinions of Eliot in his essay Romanticism and the Tradition. In the present essay Eliot replies to Murry. This essay has been divided into four parts.

i) The first part of the essay deals with Eliot’s views on critic and the critical work of art

ii) The second part of the essay deals with  Murry’s views on Romanticism and Classicism and Eliot’s contradiction with it/

iii) The third part of the essay deals with Eliot’s criticism of Murry.

iv) The fourth part of the essay deals with the relation of criticism with creative work of art.

Part I

     Eliot condemns subjective, impressionistic critics as imperfect critics. According to Eliot, a good critic has well-developed sense of fact. This does not mean that the critic should equip himself with biographical and historical facts relating to a writer. What Eliot expects of the critic is a fairly workable knowledge of technical details about a poem such as its genesis, structure, language etc. He says that the best critic is one who is also a poet. Only a poet- critic understands the poetic process and can communicate his understanding to his readers. Eliot says that comparison and analysis are the main tools of a critic. A perfect critic must know how to compare and what to compare, besides knowing how to analyse. The critic can compare writers of the present with those of the past or writers of one language with those of another. The function of a good critic is to teach readers what they ought to read. Hence, besides interpreting a literary work, the critic has also a moral role to play.

Part II

     Eliot disagrees with Murry’s views on Romanticism and Classicism, because Murry believes that Classicism and Romanticism cannot go side by side. He also says that classicism is the feature of French and romanticism is the feature of England and as he is from England, romanticism is more important for him than the other. Eliot criticizes the orthodoxy of Murry as he does not give significance to classicism. According Murry, a critic should hear and follow a natural instinct that he feels, as it is correct for him. He suggests that rules are made to be broken. Such free play can lead to doing what one likes which means the emergence of violence. Thus Eliot attacks Murry’s attitude for rejecting the dignity of the others.

Part III

    In this section Eliot tell us the reason why he took up for consideration Murry’s comparison of Outside Authority with the Inner voice. Those persons who obey the inner voice will not any meaning in Eliot’s view of criticism and its function. They will not be interested in finding out any common principles for the pursuit of criticism. They depend not on principles but on the dictates of the inner voice, and if they like a thing, that is all they want.

Part IV

     In the fourth section of the essay Eliot says that some intellectually weak people like Arnold and Murry consider criticism better than the creative art. Eliot’s opinion on the relation of criticism in the work of creation is – probably, indeed, the larger part of labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour: the labour of shifting, combining, constructing this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. There are persons who decry this critical toil of the artist, and believe that the great artist is an unconscious artist. But Eliot does not agree with his view and thinks that in more fortunate men the critical discrimination flashes in the very heart of creation.

     Critical Truths, according T.S.Eliot are not permanent and universal. The truths of one age may not be convincing or even profitable to people of another age. But even then the now invalidated truths of the previous ages have a great value because in their absence the critics of the new generation would not have  been able to discover some other and profitable truths for themselves. Every age, therefore, needs new great critics to find out truths for  that age, and tradition helps him greatly in his search.