Catharsis, the purification or purgation of the emotions (especially

pity and fear) primarily through art. In criticism, catharsis is

a metaphor used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the effects
of true tragedy on the spectator. The use is derived from the
medical term katharsis (Greek: “purgation” or “purification”).
Aristotle states that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “terror and
pity” and thereby effect the catharsis of these emotions. His exact
meaning has been the subject of critical debate over the centuries.
The German dramatist and literary critic Gotthold Lessing (1729–
81) held that catharsis converts excess emotions into
virtuous dispositions. Other critics see tragedy as a moral lesson in
which the fear and pity excited by the tragic hero’s fate serve to
warn the spectator not to similarly tempt providence. The
interpretation generally accepted is that through experiencing fear
vicariously in a controlled situation, the spectator’s own anxieties
are directed outward, and, through sympathetic identification with
the tragic protagonist, his insight and outlook are enlarged. Tragedy
then has a healthful and humanizing effect on the spectator or
reader.
Humanism, system of education and mode of inquiry that
originated in northern Italy during the 13th and 14th centuries and
later spread through continental Europe and England. The term is
alternatively applied to a variety of Western beliefs, methods, and
philosophies that place central emphasis on the human realm. Also
known as Renaissancehumanism, the historical program was so
broadly and profoundly influential that it is one of the chief reasons
why the Renaissance is viewed as a distinct historical period.
Indeed, though the word Renaissance is of more recent coinage,
the fundamental idea of that period as one of renewal and
reawakening is humanistic in origin. But humanism sought its own
philosophical bases in far earlier times and, moreover, continued to
exert some of its power long after the end of the Renaissance.
A paradox is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises,
leads to an apparently-self-contradictory or logically unacceptable conclusion.[1][2] A
paradox involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and
persist over time.[3][4][5]
Some logical paradoxes are known to be invalid arguments but are still valuable in
promoting critical thinking.[6]
Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have
caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's
paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves"
would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of
sets with properties or predicates were flawed.[7] Others, such as Curry's paradox, are
not yet resolved.
Examples outside logic include the ship of Theseus from philosophy (questioning
whether a ship repaired over time by replacing each and all of its wooden parts, one at a
time, would remain the same ship). Paradoxes can also take the form of images or other
media. For example, M.C. Escher featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his
drawings, with walls that are regarded as floors from other points of view, and staircases
that appear to climb endlessly.[8]
In common usage, the word "paradox" often refers to statements that may be both true
and false i.e. ironic or unexpected, such as "the paradox that standing is more tiring than
walking".[9]
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικός sēmantikós, "significant")[1][a] is
the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning, in language, programming languages,
formal logics, and semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—
like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for, their denotation.
In international scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The
word semantics was first used by Michel Bréal, a French philologist.[2] It denotes a range
of ideas—from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language
for denoting a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection
or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal
enquiries, over a long period of time, especially in the field of formal semantics.
In linguistics, it is the study of the interpretation of signs or symbols used
in agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.[3] Within this
view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, and proxemics have semantic
(meaningful) content, and each comprises several branches of study. In written
language, things like paragraph structure and punctuation bear semantic content; other
forms of language bear other semantic content.[3]
The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry,
including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others. Independently,
semantics is also a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.[4] In
the philosophy of language, semantics and reference are closely connected. Further
related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of
semantics can therefore be manifold and complex.
Semantics contrasts with syntax, the study of the combinatorics of units of a language
(without reference to their meaning), and pragmatics, the study of the relationships
between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users of the
language.[5] Semantics as a field of study also has significant ties to various
representational theories of meaning including truth theories of meaning, coherence
theories of meaning, and correspondence theories of meaning. Each of these is related
to the general philosophical study of reality and the representation of meaning. In 1960s
psychosemantic studies became popular after Osgood's massive cross-cultural studies
using his semantic differential (SD) method that used thousands of nouns and adjective
bipolar scales. A specific form of the SD, Projective Semantics method[6] uses only most
common and neutral nouns that correspond to the 7 groups (factors) of adjective-scales
most consistently found in cross-cultural studies (Evaluation, Potency, Activity as found
by Osgood, and Reality, Organization, Complexity, Limitation as found in other studies).
In this method, seven groups of bipolar adjective scales corresponded to seven types of
nouns so the method was thought to have the object-scale symmetry (OSS) between the
scales and nouns for evaluation using these scales. For example, the nouns
corresponding to the listed 7 factors would be: Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work,
Chaos, Law. Beauty was expected to be assessed unequivocally as “very good” on
adjectives of Evaluation-related scales, Life as “very real” on Reality-related scales, etc.
However, deviations in this symmetric and very basic matrix might show underlying
biases of two types: scales-related bias and objects-related bias. This OSS design
meant to increase the sensitivity of the SD method to any semantic biases in responses
of people within the same culture and educational background.[7][8]

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the
literary magazine The Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the
September and December issues. The essay was written by a
young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who had been living
in London for the last few years, and who had published his first volume
of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. You can read
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ here.
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role
of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central
paradoxes of Eliot’s writing – indeed, of much modernism – that in order
to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly and more
pointedly than previous poets had. This theory of tradition also highlights
Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation
and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important
older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s
contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the
twentieth century do. James Joyce looked back to ancient Greek myth (the
story of Odysseus) for his novel set in modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922).
Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours and poets of the Middle
Ages. H. D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek references and ideas.
As Eliot puts it, ‘Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us
because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are
that which we know.’ He goes on to argue that a modern poet should write
with the literature of all previous ages ‘in his bones’, as though Homer and
Shakespeare were his (or her) contemporaries: ‘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.’

In short, knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers

both part of that tradition and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own
poetry, for instance, is simultaneously in the tradition of Homer and Dante
and the work of a modern poet, and it is because of his debt to Homer and
Dante that he is both modern and traditional. If this sounds like a paradox,
consider how Shakespeare is often considered both a ‘timeless’ poet (‘Not
of an age, but for all time’, as his friend Ben Jonson said) whose work is
constantly being reinvented, but is also understood in the context of
Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political attitudes. Similarly, in using
Dante in his own poetry, Eliot at once makes Dante ‘modern’ and
contemporary, and himself – by association – part of the wider poetic
tradition.

Eliot’s essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. That is,

the poet’s personality does not matter, as it’s the poetry that s/he produces
that is important. Famously, he observes: ‘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.’
This is more or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement (in
the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads in 1800) that ‘poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings’. Once again, Eliot sets himself apart from
such a Romantic notion of poetry. This is in keeping with his earlier
argument about the importance of tradition: the poet’s personality does not
matter, only how their work responds to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.
Eliot’s example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet
who wrote The Odyssey for certain, but we don’t need to. The
Odyssey itself is what matters, not the man (or men – or woman!) who
wrote it. Poetry should be timeless and universal, transcending the
circumstances out of which it grew, and transcending the poet’s own
generation and lifetime. (Eliot’s argument raises an interesting question:
can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. by confessional poets like Sylvia
Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also be timeless and universal?
Evidently it can, as these poets’ works have outlived the poets who wrote
them.)
We might also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often
incorporated part of themselves into their work – he would do it himself,
so that, although it would be naive to read The Waste Land as being
‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his first wife, we can nevertheless see
aspects of his marriage informing the poem. And in ‘Shakespeare and the
Stoicism of Seneca’, Eliot would acknowledge that the poet of poets,
Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the Bard ‘was occupied with
the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his
personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something
universal and impersonal’. For Eliot, great poets turn personal experience
into impersonal poetry, but this nevertheless means that their poetry often
stems from the personal. It is the poet’s task to transmute personal feelings
into something more universal. Eliot is rather vague about how a poet is to
do this – leaving others to ponder it at length.
Continue to explore Eliot’s work with our short summary of Eliot’s life,
our introduction to his poem The Waste Land, our exploration of what
makes his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ so ground-
breaking, and our pick of the best biographies and critical studies of
Eliot. If you’re studying poetry, we recommend these five helpful guides
for the poetry student.
Below is a short video written and presented by Dr Oliver Tearle of
Loughborough University, which introduces a few of the key themes of
Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land. It explores how Eliot’s poem
puts his theory of ‘tradition’ into action through using lines from
Shakespeare and classical antiquity.