T.S.Eliot's Tradition and Individual Talent

Topic: T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and Individual Talent

Name: Baraiya Sonal R.

Class: M.A. Sem-2

Paper no.: 7 (Literary theory & Criticism)

Email Id: sonalbaraiya140@gmail.com

Guidance: Dr. Dilip Barad

Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi

                          Department of English

                          M.K.Bhavnagar Uni.

‘‘Tradition and Individual Talent’’ – T.S.Eliot.

About T.S.Eliot:

                           With the possible exception of Yeats, no twentieth century poet has been held in such esteem by his fellow - poets as Eliot.

His Life:

Though he became a naturalized British subject in 1927, Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri. His family was of Devonshire Origin, and its traditions were in commerce and academic studies. He entered Harvard in 1906, and, after one year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he spent a year at Oxford reading Greek philosophy. After a brief experience of teaching at Highgate School, he entered business, and spent eight years in Lloyd’s Bank in the city. At this time he was assistant editor of The Egoist (1917 – 19), and in 1923 began his career as editor of The Criterion.

                Among the many literary honours bestowed upon him mention may be made of: Charles Eliot Norton Professors of Poetry at Harvard (1932 – 33), President, Classical Association (1944), Nobel Prize for Literature (1948), and order of Merit (1948). At various times he received honorary degrees from twelve universities in Europe and America.  

T.S.Eliot with the idea of Tradition and Individual Talent:

INTRODUCTION:

T.S.Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition and Individual Talent’’ was published in 1919 in The Egoist – the Times Literary supplement. Later, the essay was published in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism in 1920/2. This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of the 20^th century. The essay is divided into three main sections:

v  The first is Eliot’s concept of tradition;

v  The second is his theory of depersonalization and poetry;

v In the third part he concludes the debate by saying that the poet’s sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.

    According to Gareth Reeves – ‘‘Until the middle of the last century, Eliot’s idea of tradition was extraordinarily influential. His essay ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ (1919) was a major contributor to Modernism’s rise and hegemony. The essay’s decline accompanied that of Modernism, and in the academy it suffered the fate of the abandoned lover: spurn and neglect. Like its author, it came to be regarded as conservative elitist, obsessed with order, and backward – looking. This was hardly surprising at a time when Modernism turned postmodernism, when plurality supplanted hierarchy, when the notion of a literary canon was under fire, when, indeed, what constituted literary studies was under intense scrutiny. To many, any idea of tradition came to seem irrelevant the chimera of a bygone age.’’

                    At the outset of the essay, Eliot asserts that the word ‘‘tradition’’ is not a very favourable term with the English who generally utilize the same as a term of censure. The English do not possess an orientation towards criticism as the French do, they praise a poet for those aspects of the work that are individualistic.

                 However, they fail to realize that the best and the most individual part of the poet’s work is that reflects maximum influence of writers of the past. Tradition does not imply a blind adherence to the literary tradition of the past tradition. This would amount to mere copying or slavish imitation.

                For Eliot, Tradition has a three – fold significance.

v Firstly, tradition cannot be inherited and involves a great deal of labour and erudition.

v Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves apperception not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence.

v Thirdly, the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continuous literary tradition.

As claimed by Chris Baldick that Eliot had created an inverted literary history in which history being second to the permanent quality of literature, is readjusted to accommodate it to literature. Therefore, Eliot’s conception of history is a dynamic one and not static; and is forever in a state of flux.

Part – 1

1)     In English literary criticism ‘‘Tradition’’ is used as a phrase of censure.

2)     Criticism is indispensable creative activity.

3)     The importance of ‘Tradition to Individual Talent’.

           Eliot says that the Englishmen have a tendency to insist, when they praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects of his work they try to find out what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of that man. They try to find out the difference of the poet with his contemporaries and predecessors, especially with his immediate predecessors. They try to find out something that can be separated in order to be enjoyed.

           But if we study the poet without bias or prejudice, we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their impressionable period of adolescence but in the period of their full maturity. According to Eliot tradition and individual talent are not separate entity. They are inseparable and hence go together.

To him knowledge of tradition plays vital role in the development of personal talent. He writes, ‘‘Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves the historical sense’’. This means: ‘‘the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.’’

               A creative artist, though he lives in a particular milieu, does not work merely with his own generation in view. He does not take his own age, or the literature of that period only as a separate identity, but acts with the conviction that in general the whole literature of the continent from the classical age of the Greeks onwards and in particular the literature of his own country, is to be taken as a harmonious whole. His own creative efforts are not apart from it but a part of it.

The close relationship and interdependence of the past and the present:

    Eliot gives importance to the interdependence of the past and the present. He finds not contradictory but supplementary elements in the co-relationship of the past and the present. He expresses his views as follows: ‘‘No poet no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monumeres form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervening of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English Literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.’

The relationship of a poet’s work to the great works of the past:

Eliot is of the view that the present work of art should not be judged by the standards of the past. The present work may or may not conform to the standards of the past, but it should not decide whether the work of art is good or bad. Eliot explains it as; ‘‘in a peculiar sense modern writer will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judge, not amputated, by them; not judge to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but it’s fitting in is a test of its value-a test; it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.’’

Literature as Continuity:

   To be traditional in Eliot’s sense means to be conscious of the main current of art and poetry. The poem/poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He writes: ‘‘the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show’’.

   Eliot covers the possible objection that his doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition and that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. He says that there is a distinction between knowledge and pedantry. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential histories upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

Part - 2

His theory of Depersonalization:

    He starts the second part of his essay with: ‘‘Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry’’.

   The artist or the poet adopts the process of depersonalization, which is ‘‘a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’’ There still remain to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to sense of tradition.

                       Eliot explains this by comparing it to a chemical process –

                    The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases Oxygen and Sulphur dioxide, are mixed In the presence of a filament of Platinum, they Sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the Platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.’’

                The elements of the experience of the poet are of two kind – emotions and feelings. They are the elements which entering the presence of the poet’s mind and acting as a catalyst, go to the making of a work of art. The final effect produced by a work of art may be formed out of several emotions into one, it may be formed out of a single emotion or out of the feelings invoked in the poet by various words and images. Thus the poet’s mind is 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.

               Eliot explains his theory of depersonalization more elaborately. He elaborates his idea by saying that the emotions and experiences in the art are different than the emotions and experiences of the artist. He writes: ‘‘If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great the variety of types of combination is, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of ‘‘sublimity’’ misses the mark. For it is not the ‘‘greatest,’’ the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.’’ He further writes: ‘‘the poet has, not a ‘‘personality’’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.’’

               It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that ‘‘emotion recollected in tranquility’’ is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. 

       It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration , of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not ‘‘recollected,’’ and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ‘‘tranquil’’ only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘‘personal.’’ 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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Part – 3

       In the last section of this essay, Eliot says that the poet’s sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things. Eliot writes: ‘‘to divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad.’’ Finally he ends his essay with: ‘‘very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.’’

Conclusion:

                       In short, we can say that Eliot’s idea of ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ is similar with New Criticism. Unwittingly, Eliot inspired and informed the movement of New Criticism.  This is somewhat ironic, since he later criticized their excruciatingly detailed analysis of texts. Yet, he does share with them the same focus on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of poetry, rather than on its ideological content. The New Critics resemble Eliot in their close analysis of particular passages and poems.

Reflection of Indian mentality in the Fakeer of Jungheera

Name: Sonal Baraiya.

Roll No.: 34.

Sub: Indian Writing in English – Pre Independence.

Topic: Reflection of Indian Mentality in the Fakeer of Jungheera.

                                                   

                                        In the Fakeer of Jungheera, Derozio dexterously mixes the tantric, Hindu mythological, Islamic and Christian traditions to create a composite whole that corresponds to the elegiac European tradition of the nineteenth century and the syncretistic Sufi tradition of the fifteenth century. Derozio’s marginalized Anglo-Indian background was ideally suited to the hybrid and impure tradition of the tantric tale. The world of magic, resurrection and immorality that the tantric tradition provides was more suited to the Fakeer- Nuleeni’s tragic tale than the purist and idealized versions of Hindu, Christian or Islamic thought. Derozio confessed that he found the tale quite fascinating when he first heard it from a student of Hindu college and realized that it would fit perfectly with the Jungheera story of inter-religious blighted love tale that he was narrating. Probably because of the impurity and Hybridity of the poem many literary historians have rejected it from inclusion in the Indian literary canon. As the lie goes, if Monarch Vikram relic steady in his effect for his queen he can resurrect her and erstwhile solon both can reach felicity unitedly. The dauntless fortitude and spirit that the queen exemplifies by qualifying through the horrible or deals in the necropolis slip to his success, provides a fitting close to the sad end of the Islamist in the aggregation of his loved Nuleeni. If the tale of the Baital is honorable then

                                    ‘‘the treated out eloquence’’

Of Nuleeni can again be resurrected in the accumulation of the Islamist if she can overtake finished the horrors and temptations of account. Nevertheless those are unstated assumptions, a line of the mass environs of the tarradiddle that forces the order to reflect upon the antepenultimate verbalizer broods over the tragic environment divesting us of all emotions, merely reflecting on a thoroughfare, which may presently be resolute finished a dues ex machine.

                                        The open – ended picture makes the elergyman emit on a quieted engendered by a purging. The poem can be indicate as story of emancipation of equenched Asian women and an indictment of the grownup Asiatic gild in the nineteenth century. The light and bonnie Nuleeni refuses to die on the funeral pyre of her spouse and escapes with the thief Mohammedan to his cave in Jungheera to a being of impermissible bang though afraid by tough sociable repercussions. She believes that her lover’s courageousness and her unfailing Jazz leave finally make them victorious. Her blonde and glorious present brightens the glooming inter- personal surround of the poem and mitigates the steep mettlesome rebellion of the weaker faith draws the attention to the inequality of the sexes and the mixer unease rampant in Magadha order of the dimension. The poem has a grievous coach in the use of gregarious themes in literate texts endorsing a syncretistic practice quite popular in ordinal century Bengal.

                                                The proponent of The Saint poem is a robber Mohammedan or a mendicant, who belongs to both anonymous Islamist camp, times the protagonist, the widow Nuleeni, comes from a speed caste Magadha Religionist tribe. Derozio’s uses religion imagery, specified as heaven and angels hurry sound active, and juxtaposes it against the religionist tradition of sati, Muhammedan prayers and Buddhism tale of Aristocrat Vikramajit and Baital to create a stylish, idiom condition. Though the tantric tale seems to be a prolonged excursus within a sad tale of a destroyed Hindu – Muslim object thing, it nonetheless places the tragedy in an unprocessed practice after having unloved all the new dominant churchlike forms.

                                       Sati – Pratha

The Social Malaise of Sati:

     

                                                    At the ancient time there are many rules and regulations in which one of the most famous is ‘Sati’. ‘Sati – pratha’ is the most means high influence on Indian mentality. In that time women situations, conditions are very pathetic. That is also describe in ‘The Fakeer of Jungheera’ very well by Henry Derozio.

                                                  Instead of belaboring upon the misery of slavery, Derozio embarked upon a mission of resolving some of the inherent evils of Hindu society especially – ‘the practice of widow burning’.

                                                 In 1829 when William Bentinck abolished sati Derozio wrote a poem entitled ‘‘On the Abolition of Satee’’ in praise of Regulation xvii extolling the merits of the decree:

     ‘‘Bentinck, be thine the everlasting mead! The heart’s full homage still is virtue’s claim, and ’tis good man’s ever honored deed. Which gives an immortality to fame: that glory lights upon the wastes of war: Nations unborn shall vererate thy name, A triumph than the conqueror’s mightier far, Thy memory shall be blessed as is the morning star.’’

               In the Fakeer of Jungheera, Chorus of women who are suggest her to become a ‘sati’. When she become a sati rather you can say that when she died she going in heaven. That is indicates under the stanzas,

  ‘‘Such is the boon that to her shall be given; Myriads of ages for her are in store; she shall enjoy all the blessings of heaven, Till heaven, and its blessing themselves are no more.’’

‘‘Happy! Thrice happy thus early to leave, Earth and its sorrows, for heaven and its bliss! Who that hath known it at parting would grieve, Quitting a world so disastrous at this?’’

And they are also believed in that when someone being a sati who is going in heaven because it is good deeds for her and wherein she meet her husband, that is also indicates in one stanza;

Happy! thrice happy! Thy lord shall there meet thee, twined round his heart shalt thou ever remain; Happy! Bright angels are longing to greet thee, tuned are their harp strings, and ready their strain.’’

 This stanza indicates that when she died, she meet her husband. But how are known that when she died she meet her husband in heaven or not. The fact is, that so far from any display of enthusiastic affection, a suttee, is a spectacle of misery, exciting in the spectator a melancholy reflection upon the tyranny of superstition and priest – craft. The poor creatures who suffer from this inhuman rite, have but little notion of the heaven and the million years of uninterrupted happiness to which their spiritual guides tell them to look forward. The choice of immediate death, or a protracted existence, where to be only must contend their desire, is all that is offered to them; and who under such circumstances would hesitate about the preference? The most degrading and humiliating household offices must be performed by a Hindu Widow; she is not allowed more food than will suffice to keep her alive; she must sleep upon the bare carth; and suffer indignities from the youngest members of her family; these are only a few of her sufferings. The philanthropic views of some individuals are directed to the abolition of Widow – burning; but they should first ensure the comfort of these unhappy women in their widowhood – otherwise, instead of conferring a boon upon them, existence will be to many a drudge, and a load.

         Derozio approvingly quotes a writer from the ‘‘Indian Magazine’’ and endorses the latter’s opinion that sati constitutes the most barbaric and degrading aspect of Indian Society which can be overcome through education and intellectual development. Nonetheless with all his self – assurance and animosity for con – cremation, Derozio seems somewhat bewildered by cases of willful self – immolation. During the nineteenth century many upper caste Hindu women willfully committed sati mistakenly believing in the veracity of the Hindu ritual, as if mesmerized into an abominable act through a long process of socialization.

    Thrilled by the regulation Derozio felt that the ‘‘widow’s wail’’ was over at last and the ‘‘flames from impious pyres’’ have been forever extinguished though its ‘‘dismal’’ history would continue to haunt us. He believed that now sati declared illegal women would enjoy freedom and ‘‘social bliss’’ in a new India. The poem was dramatically signed in capital letters – INDIA – could be construed as a sign of the emerging identity of a new India that Derozio envisaged.

  The issue of sati was not just a social phenomenon. Natural causes and hygienic practice also aggravated the malaise. It must however be remembered that the increase in the number of sati was also related to a large extent to the spread of cholera epidemics in the nineteenth century that originated along the banks of the Ganges River and spread to other parts of the world reaching through the middle East and Europe up to the united states. Though there were many reasons for the increase of incidents of sati in Bengal the death rate of married Bengali males was a significant factor.

Caste System:

                          Indian mentality also believed in caste system. In which Brahmins are belongs to upper caste and all are under them. So, in the Fakeer of Jungheera Nuleeni who was belongs to upper caste. She was comes from a Bengali Hindu family.

                            Nuleeni, who was love with Fakeer who was, belongs to another caste, Muslim. Nuleeni’s strong feelings with Fakeer. But because of different caste system, Nuleeni’s parents against with their relationship. So, her parents committed her marriage with rich Brahmin. But at the end Nuleeni escaped with Fakeer, their parents and her caste members also against with both of them, because of social prestige. It is indicates that because of caste system Nuleeni and Fakeer not commit marriage.

        

Formalistic Approach of Hamlet

Name: Sonal Baraiya.

Roll No: 34.

Subject: P.1 – The Renaissance Literature.

Topic: Formalistic Approach of "Hamlet".

                            

What is Formalism?

                            Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. Formalism rejects notions of culture or societal influence, authorship, and content, and instead focuses on modes, genres, discourses, and forms.

                           In Hamlet we seemed various approaches but we focuses only on formalistic approach – 

The Trap Metaphor in Hamlet such as:

1.    The Trap Imagery.

2.    The cosmological Trap.

3.    ‘‘Seeming’’ and ‘‘Being.’’

4.    ‘‘Seeing’’ and ‘‘Knowing.’’

         The formalist perspective is one of the best perspectives to use in the play Hamlet, prince of Denmark. It helps a person find the hidden meaning throughout the play in multiple ways, which allow a person to truly understand the play completely such way is like when Ophelia goes crazy after her father is murdered and Hamlet is sent away. She sings songs to the Queen and king of Denmark that at first glance are just songs. When looked at between the lines; however, the two songs she sings are of her father and Hamlet. The song about Hamlet talks not only about Hamlet but of her secret pregnancy with Hamlet’s child. This is also mentioned before Ophelia goes crazy and polonius, Ophelia’s father is still alive, and Hamlet is just beginning to act crazy. Hamlet mentions  something to polonius about not letting his daughter out because she might be or get pregnant. Such lines and places in the play like this at first seem to be nothing at all. However, if looked at between the lines then another completely different meaning is sent across. The formalist perspective allows people to view the play in this way getting hidden meaning in it while figuring out the plot.

         In Hamlet there are many different types of formalist perspectives but while reading think Shakespeare really focuses on tone in Hamlet. Hamlet states ‘‘he is going to come at him mom with words like daggers’’ and in doing that Hamlet is changing his tone from upset and disappointed to harming and hurtful while talking to his mother. During this scene Hamlet uses great word choice saying how disgusted his is with his mother and uncle for the acts of wrong that they have done. Hamlet is easily able to slip in and out of his role as being known as a crazy man which also adds to Shakespeare’s great use of perspectives.

            The formalist perspective truly gives insight in the true actions occurring in ‘‘Hamlet’’ by William Shakespeare. By Hamlet’s word choice in the first conversation with the king in act – 1 we can clearly see the distain that is already beginning to brew because of his uncle talking power and even more, taking Hamlet’s mother to be his wife.

                                             ‘‘A Little more than kin, and less than kind.’’

In this statement you can see the words shows the deeper meaning of the saying when Hamlet’s says this it is showing us as reader/ listeners that Hamlet really he is not really pleased that they are even family. To him it was bad enough that Claudius was his uncle now when Claudius says,

                                             ‘‘But, now my cousin Hamlet, and my son.’’

It is too much for Hamlet to take and through the formalist we are able to grasp that Hamlet distains this and wishes that he could remove himself from the situation that he has been placed in.

             Through the formalist perspective you can see deeper meaning in ordinary lines, such as this seemingly normal replay in act two; scene two, when he says,

                                                  ‘‘Not so, my loard; I am too much in the sun.’’

At first glance all we see is a slanted comment in self-defense but if you read the words closer in a formalist perspective. You are able to see the message Shakespeare, was trying to convey. This is, that Hamlet understands at least portions of what has happened while the rest of the castle is in the clouds on what has really happened and what Claudius is doing. As you can see the formalist perspective can really help you understanding grow and give you the tools to unlock the mysteries of Shakespeare. Here are some types of formalist perspective:

1.    The Trap Imagery:

                                  ‘‘My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; and like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first being, and both neglect.’’

                                   The words are not those of Hamlet. They are spoken by Claudius, as he tries to pray for forgiveness, even as he knows that he cannot give up those things for which he murdered his brother – his crown, his fulfilled ambition, and his wife. But the words may easily have been Hamlet’s, for he too is by ‘‘double business bound’’. Indeed, much of the play centers on doubleness. In that doubleness lies the essence of what we mean by ‘‘dialectic’’ here – a confrontation of polarities. A consequence of that doubleness for many of the characters is that they are apparently caught in a trap a key metaphor in the play – or, in another image, 

                                ‘‘Hoist with own petard.’’

Let us examine that metaphor of the trap, for it leads clearly to our seeing how dialectic provides form in Hamlet. Several time in the play, but in varying images, we find allusions to different kinds of entanglement. Polonius injudiciously uses the metaphor to warn Ophelia away from Hamlet’s

                     ‘‘holy vows of heaven,’’

vows that he says are

                        ‘‘springs to catch woodcocks.’’

More significant is Hamlet’s deliberate misnaming of ‘The Murder of Gonzago’; he calls it ‘‘The Mousetrap’’ because it is, as he says elsewhere, ‘‘the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’’ Claudius feels that he is trapped and speak that ‘‘O limmed soul, that, struggling to be free, / Art more engaged Hamlet, in the hands of plotters, finds himself ‘‘thus be – netted round with villainies’’ and one for whom Claudius has thrown out his angle for my proper life. The dying Laertes echoes his father’s metaphor when he tells Osric that he is as a wood to mine own springe. Here we have a pattern of trap images – springs, lime, nets, mousetraps, and angles or hooks Now traps are usually for animals, but we are dealing with human beings, people who are trapped in their own dilemmas, in their own questions, in the very questioning of the universe.

2.    The Cosmological Trap:

                                          The first scene of act -1 to realize that it is a disturbed world, that a sense of mystery and deep anxiety preoccupies the soldiers of the watch. The ghost has appeared already and is expected to appear again. The guards instinctively assume that the apparition of the former king has more than passing import; and, in their troubled questions to Horatio about the mysterious preparations for war, the guards show how closely they regard the connection between the unnatural appearance of the dead king and the welfare of the state. The guards have no answers for the mystery, their uncertainty, or their premonitions; their quandary is mirrored in abundant questions and minimal answers – a rhetorical phenomenon that recurs throughout the play, even in the soliloquies of Hamlet; in other words an instance of dialectic. The sense of cosmic implication in the special situation of Denmark emerges strongly in the exchange between Hamlet and his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Much earlier, before his encounter with the ghost, Hamlet expressed his, extreme pessimism at man’s having to endure earthly existence with in nature’s unwholesome realm.

                                         ‘‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.’’

    As he speaks these lines Hamlet apparently has no idea of the truth of his father’s death but is dismayed over his mother’s hasty marriage to the new king. He has discovered a seeming paradox in the nature of existence; the fair, in nature and humanity, inevitably submits to the dominion of the foul. His obsession with the paradox focuses his attention on Denmark as the model nature and human frailty. Thus a pattern of increasing parallels between Denmark and the cosmos and between man and nature develops. Question and answer dialogue and soliloquy, become a verbal unity of repeated words and phrases, looking forward to larger thematic assertion and backward to earlier adumbration.

   The play constitutes a vast poem in which speculation about nature, human nature, the health of the state, and human destiny intensifies into a passionate dialectic. Mystery, riddle, enigma, and metaphysical question complicate the dialogue. Particularly in his Hamlet confronts questions that have obsessed protagonists from Sophocles’ Oedipus to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What begins with the relatively simple questions of the soldiers of the watch in act – 1 is magnified and complicated as the play moves on. Increasingly tenuous and rarefied probes of the maddening gulf between reality and appearance proliferate. Moreover, the contrast between what the simple man cheerfully accepts at face value and what the thoughtful man is driven to question calls into doubt every surface of utterance, act, or thing. In the world of Hamlet the cosmic implications of myriad distinctions between ‘‘seem’’ and ‘‘be’’ confront us at every hand.

3.    ‘‘Seeing’’ and ‘‘knowing’’:

                                            The design of the play can be perceived in part in the elaborate play upon the words ‘‘see’’ and ‘‘know’’ and their cognates. Whereas the deity  can be understood as ‘‘Looking before and after,’’ the player king points out to his queen that there is a hiatus between what people intend and what they do: ‘‘Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’’ Forced by Hamlet to  consider the difference between her two husbands, Gertrude cries out in anguish   against having to see into her own motivations:

                                                   ‘‘O Hamlet, speak no more. Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, and there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct.’’

   But she does not see the ghost of her former husband, nor can she see the metaphysical implications of Hamlet’s reason in madness. The blind eye sockets of Yorick’s skull once saw their quota of experience, but most people in Denmark are quite content with the surface appearances of life and refuse even to consider the ends to which mortality brings everyone. The intricate weaving's of images of sight thus become a kind of tragic algebra for the plight of a man who seemed to find his way without his eyes’’ and who found himself at last ‘‘yet unknowing world.’’ The contest between human aspiration and natural order in which Hamlet finds himself is all too unequal: idealism turns out to be a poor match for the prison wall of either Denmark or the grave.