Tradition and the Individual Talent

The extract is taken from T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent written in 1920. The essay develops Eliot's attitude towards tradition in art.
The reader finds Eliot's thesis in the first lines of the excerpt where he explains that "not only the best...most vigorously" that means the great artist is not the one who creates something new "ab nhilo" (because it is impossible according to Eliot), but the one who recognizes the importance of the past. Nevertheless, Eliot explains that not every work of art of the past can be considered an example, because the great artist is the one who understands he should be inspired by "the period of fully maturity" of his ancestors.
According to Eliot iit s important to underline that to be inspired by somebody or something is different 

from to copy from him, especially to copy from the immediate generation before. The custom of copying the previous generation of artist is something that  should be discouraged according to Eliot because "novelty is better than repetition".
Later on Eliot focuses his attention on the historical sense, which is one of the sources from which you can recognize the importance of  tradition; the historical sense (which according to Eliot is the condition for  anyone who wants to be an innovative  poet) involves "a perception, not only of the pastness of past, but of its presence". It means that the poet to be traditional has to recognize the importance of the past not only in relation with the past, but in relation with the present, that is the reason why "No poet, no artist of any art, has a complete meaning alone".
In the essay Eliot seems to anticipate the issues developed by Post-Structuralism, where the meaning is given "for contrast and comparison".
In addition, Eliot describes art as an ideal order, where an artist puts its work of art and it has to find its place in relation with previous works of art. The order seems always to be complete, but when a new work of art arrives it readjust everything and this is defined by Eliot as "conformity between the old and the new".
Eliot concludes admitting that a poet who is aware of such relations "will be aware of great difficulties and responsabilities".