ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot’s poet is en-transed because Eliot is a vexed victim of trans-habit. Deeply committed to a perception of tradition or a historical sense which ‘is a labile, self-transformative organism extended in space and time, constantly reorganized by the present’4 and which involves not just the ‘pastness of the past but of its presence’ and the ‘sense of the timeless and of the temporal, and of the timeless and the temporal together’,5 Eliot addresses the existence of the poet in a planetarity, in diffracted modes of association and interference. Dissatisfied with the vagueness of impressionistic criticism, he institutes a scientific inquiry into the process by which a work is produced to account for its effect. In spite of sharing a common Modernist elitism, he, quite often, files an apology for traditional hierarchical values. In spite of his classicist leanings, he did not intend to arrange and systematise his ideas into a coherent theory of poetry; he was not interested in the formal definitions of poetry. What he sincerely attempted is to push the cause of his own new kind of writing: ‘I believe that the critical writings of poets, of which in the past there have been some very distinguished examples, owe a great deal of their interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write’.6 Eliot’s trans-habits of creativity do not throw the poet over-indulgently into the muddle of materialschaotic, shifting and fluid. It points to a critical sensibility, ensures a
growth of consciousness of a ‘living past’—the entire pattern of emotion, feeling, moral, forms, rhythms and words is modified by the existing or contemporary pattern. He observes that ‘we need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as present to us as the present. This is the creative eye’.7 The creative eye, I would like to argue, owes its figurations and configurations to Eliot’s deeply intricate trans-habitations.
