Text:Traditional and Individual Talent
Task:analyse: a) the structure of T.S. Eliot's essay; b) the content; c) your opinion about it.

TRADITIONAL and INDIVIDUAL TALENTS

In the essay Eliot wants to provide his vision of tradition and the definition of writing poetry. He underlines the relationship between the writer and the previous literary tradition.

Tradition for Eliot is conceivedc of a simultaneous order, a relationship between the present and the past, and all writers can't abstract from this aspect. So, whoever writes must know that when he composes a text or a poem he does it in relation with what was created in the past.

But historical sense is not only the skill to create texts, but also to understand the present. As a matter of fact the present is the result of the past, so if people do not know the past he will not understand the present.

The idea is that poets must consider not only contemporaneity, but  the pastas well.

A poet must consider "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," and in relation to it express his contemporary thought.

Creating a new type of work is a form of re-creation. As a matter of fact when a poet thinks about a new idea, he makes it on the basis of what has been done by all the literary tradition, because he goes back and even if unaware he reconsiders all the paths of the poets that came before him have done.

New work means offering a new vision and a readjustment of the old tradition.

T.S. Eliot's thesis can be summed up in the following motto:  "everything is a form of re-writing".

I agree with Mr. Eliot, because I think that writing is a process thatimplies inclusive knowledge on the background. As a matter of fact, also in scientific research, people must re-seach in  previous discoveries  to find further aspects of the same thing.