Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
The Tradition and the Individual Talent written in 1920 is an essay of literary criticism. It talks about tradition and present.
We can divide the text in two parts. In the first part he says "the most individual parts of his (poet's) work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously". T.S. Eliot says that a poet shows is greatness when, in is works he shows the presence of his predecessors most vigorously. A poet is able to do this only with great labour. T.S Eliot says that you can gain tradition only if you grasp the historical sense. This sense gives you the right level of consciousness to recognize the mixture of past and present we find in texts. "The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation but[...]has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order". When a poet has gained the historical sense he is considered a traditional poet.
In the second part of the essay T.S Elliot writes "no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone". His significance is appreciated only because of his relation to past poets or artists. "You can't value him (the artist) alone". Whenever a poet or an artist composes something, his work is the total of what has preceded him. At the end he says that whenever a work is made it modifies all the relations that where before, and will modify also the future works.