How Eliot Refutes Wordsworth’s Concept of “emotion recollected in Tranquility”

Eliot expresses his anti romantic view of creative process in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” He disapproves of the romantic view of poetry as a sentimental expression of subjective feelings. Accordingly he rejects the emotive statement of Wordsworth-“emotion recollected in tranquility.” Wordsworth’s formula involves three components for poetic composition- emotion, recollection and tranquility.

Regarding the first component, Eliot puts forward his own theory of emotion and feelings. He distinguishes between emotion and feeling. He says hat emotion arises out of personal incident or situation of a poet’s life. It is closely associated with a poet’s private life.

Feelings, on the contrary are only remotely or thinly associated with personal situation. Feelings can be aroused by an image, a word or a phrase. For example, the Ode of Keats contains a cluster of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the Nightingale, but which the Nightingale partly perhaps because of its evocative name and partly because of its reputation, served to brig together.

On the contrary, Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ is composed with the direct use of emotion rooted in personal incident. The emotion of gloomy despair conveyed in Coleridge’s poem is a working up of the poet’s similar emotion evident in a phase of his personal life. Eliot asserts that a poem can be composed either with emotion or with feelings. It is not always necessary that poetry must originate from emotion. In this way Eliot rejects the subjective emotionalism of Wordsworth’s theory.

He further states that it is not for the emotions generated by particular events of a poet’s life that a poet earns distinction. Rather personal emotions are distilled, processed and transmuted into what Eliot calls structural or art emotion, for which a poet deserves consideration. And emotion achieves some degree of impersonality. Thus Eliot depersonalizes the romantic magnification of personal emotion in poetry. Poetry is not a medium to unleash raw emotion in an artless, uncontrolled and undisciplined way. Hence Eliot maintains that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion. Rather it is a controlled, selective, pattered expression of emotion. It demands some kind of some kind of masking and distancing of personal emotion- a kind of artistic detachment, a sort of decorum, some sort of veiling. This is what Eliot means by “an escape from emotion.”

Eliot does not accept that poetry has always something to do with “recollection”. In other words recollection is not an indispensable material for poetry. Earlier Eliot observes that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” This statement implies that poetry is not completely candid (frank) expression of the total personality of a poet. Rather it is an expression of a significant aspect of life. And in creative process, there is a great deal which is conscious and deliberate. Thus Eliot attaches importance to intellect and rational faculty in addition to emotion and feelings.

In one of his influential essays The Metaphysical Poets – Eliot praises the metaphysical poets for their unified sensibility, which results from a fusion of emotion and intellect. Here too he recommends a unified sensibility- a synthesis of emotion and intellect.

Then he refuses Wordsworth’s requirement of tranquility in creative activity. He implies that the moment of composition is a heightened moment of psychic activity and introspection. It is a moment of excitement and concerted effect when the total mind strains to attain the desired height. It is a stimulated state of mind when an intense, purposive intellect brings feelings or emotions into new order. It can not be a relaxed, serene, tension-free state. Wordsworth’s reference to “tranquility” implies a kind of passive effortlessness. As Eliot says – it is not “ a passive attending upon the event”.

It is a moment or act of concentration- when al mental and emotional faculties are intently occupied in performing a creative fat. Thus Eliot refutes Wordsworth’s formula of creative process. I this way he manifesto his anti-romantic, modern, classical standpoint.

Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads as a manifesto of Romantic Movement

Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads declares the dawn of English Romantic Movement. Wordsworth and Coleridge, with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, break away with the neo-classical tendencies in poetry. As the reading people are not familiar with his new type of poetry, Wordsworth puts forward a preface to this book. In this preface, he tells us about the form and contents of this new type of poetry.

Wordsworth, in the beginning, states the necessity of bringing about a revolution in the realm of poetry as the Augustan poetry has become cliché. He painfully notices that the Eighteenth century poets have separated poetry from the grasp of common people. He resolves to liberate this poetry from the shackles of so- called classical doctrines. He, in collaboration with his friend Coleridge, begins to write poem for the people of all classes. Wordsworth thinks that the language of the Augustan poetry is highly artificial and sophisticated. That is why he suggests a new language for Romantic poetry. This is why he suggests a new language for Romantic poetry. This is why he suggests a new language for Romantic poetry. These attempt chiefly deals with Wordsworth’s views of poetry.

Wordsworth thinks that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. To him, the intensity of feelings is more important than the form.

To make poetry life like, he wants to use the language of common people as the common people express their feeling unfeignedly. But he tells about a selection, because common people use gross and unrefined language. So, he will purify the language of rustic people until it is ready for use.

Wordsworth seems to contradict his own views as he prefers a selection to the original language spoken by the rustic people.

T. S. Eliot, in his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, objects to Wordsworth’s view. Eliot tells that a poet should not imitate the language of a particular class because he ought to have a language of his own. Eliot’s view gains ground as Wordsworth in his later poems, fails to use his prescribed language. His diction is, in fact peculiar to him.

But Wordsworth’s definitions of poetry ad the poet are unique. He maintains that poetry is more philosophical than any other branch of knowledge. He likes the poet to a prophet who is endowed with a greater knowledge of life and nature.

The neo-classical poets consider the province of poetry to be the world of fictions. But for Wordsworth the province of poetry is the world of truth, not a world of make-believe. Wordsworth like Samuel Johnson believes that only “the manifestations of general truth” can please all people. That is why he rejects the hackneyed poetic style of the Augustan period.

Wordsworth differs with the neo-classical writers in his belief about the process of poetry. The neo-classical writers think that the poet’s mind is a sensitive but passive recorder of a natural phenomenon. But Wordsworth strongly opposes this view and thinks that the mind of the poet is never a passive recorder. In his view, the poet’s mind half creates the external world which he perceives. The external world is thus, in some degree, the very creation of human mind. Wordsworth seems to establish the fact that the poet’s mind and the external nature are both interlinked and interdependent. Wordsworth unlike the classicists can not separate the mind which suffers from the mind which composes.

Wordsworth points out the common characteristics of both poetry and science. But he places poetry over science for the fact that the large part of poetry is based on imagination. He beautifully discovers that science only appeal to intellect while poetry appeals to heart. For this, the pleasures of science are shared by few while the pleasures of poetry are open to all. Again the truth of science is subject to change while poetry does not suffer from such threat.

Wordsworth breaks with the classical theory of poetry when he advocates for the intensity of emotion. To him, reason is not at all important. This is a subjective view.

It cannot be said that Wordsworth is absolutely right in his theory of poetry. But it must be recognized that his views are innovative and creative.

His rejection of classical doctrines leads to the creation of a new type of poetry which prefers him emotions to reason. As a result a group of talented poet’s has emerged in the province of English poetry. At the same time, he has contributed to the field of literary criticism. If Blake is considered to be the precursor of romantic poetry, Wordsworth and Coleridge are the two early exponents of romantic poetry. And it is wise of Wordsworth to form a ground for this new poetry through the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

How did W. B Yeats and T.S Eliot dominate the first half of the 20th century?

W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot dominated the first half of the 20th century. In W.B. Yeats two generations of poetry met. He wrote his earlier poems under the influence of the romanticists, like Spenser, Shelley, Rossetti and particularly of the late Victorian romantic escapists. The second stage of Yeats’s poetry comprises his symbolic and mystical poems, like The Wandering of Oisin and The Wind among the Reeds.

Yeats realized that poetry had to be adjusted to the changes of his time, and this he achieved in and individual way. Through Blake and Siedenborg he found a metaphysical approach. Some of the sources he employed magic and the like seemed unworthy, but the poetic results were of profound beauty. Apart from this philosophical change much else was happening. He was profoundly moved by the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which resulted in the Easter rebellion, as is seen in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’.

He stands out as the greatest poetical figure of the first half of the twentieth century, of a stature beyond controversy. Out of fables and strange beliefs he made images to hold beauty together in a world where so much conspired for its destruction. In his verses he showed a dominant, even arrogant control of his medium, using simple phrases with a mastery that equaled that of Wordsworth. His later verse is seen at its best in The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robertes and the Dancer; The Tower; and The Winding Stair.

T.S. Eliot was an American born British poet. He is essentially a modern poet who stands on a footing different from the Romantic and Victorian poets of the nineteenth century. T.S. Eliot both by verse and prose essays, made a revolution in the taste of his generation. His early poems in Prufrock were satiric, sometimes comic, always dramatic and impersonal, with an underlying disparagement of the so-called benefits of civilization. His first remarkable poem The love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock represents, indeed, a complete departure from the conventional poetry of the 19th century and even the poetry of the pre-war years of the twentieth and marks entirely a new beginning. The major influences in it were to be Donne, the later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and Laforgue, with Dante also frequently present.

Eliot’s another celebrated work is The waste Land which is one of the significant poetic creations of modern times. It is a vivid expression of the poet’s nightmare vision of the hollow life of modern men and women. The poem represents symbolically the failure of modern civilization through the scenes of desolation and social emptiness. The influence of The Waste Land has been immense:no poet, in his own life-time, has seen erected such a verbal monument of criticism over his work. The meaning has complex references often half-concealed, which lead to commentary, yet the poem is best read without the notes for the effect made on the imagination. To sum up Eliot has a major influence on his generation and created a poetic revolution.

What Does Wordsworth Mean by "Spontaneous Overflow of Powerful feelings"

By “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, Wordsworth opines that poetry is a matter of mood and inspiration. Poetry evolves from the feelings of the poet. Poetry’s source is the feeling in the heart, not the ideas of the intellect. A poet cannot write under pressure. In this regard, poetry flows out of his heart in a natural and fluent manner. Deep emotion is the basic condition of poetry; powerful feelings and emotions are fundamental. Without them great poetry can not be written. But T. S. Eliot in his Tradition and the Individual Talent rejects Wordsworth's definition of poetry and holds the idea that a writer should be impersonal and his writings should be devoid of personal emotion and feelings.

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility

To begin with Wordsworth’s words, “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” At first glance, these two statements seem contradictory but Wordsworth’s theory of poetry involved the fusion of the two statements. In a sense powerful feelings and profound thought make poetry perfect. Wordsworth told that the poet can’t rely on sensibility alone. He has to be a person who has also thought long and deeply. After that, a calm mind is equally necessary to furnish the past/ previous thoughts/ feelings.

At first, the poet observes some object, character or situation. It sets up powerful emotions in his mind. The poet doesn’t react immediately. He allows it to sink into his mind along with the feelings which it has excited. Then comes the recollection of the emotion, at a later moment. The emotion is recollected in tranquility. There might be a time lapse of several years. Thus poetry originates in emotion recollected in tranquility and so ultimately the product of the original free flow of that emotion.