Eliot’s TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT is a critical essay on traditions of poetry. According to that Eliot thinks that “if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual part of his work may be those in which the dead poets , his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously”. The writer says that there can’t be at all any literature without the one of its predecessors and where it seems that a writer copied another one, he affirms strongly his individuality. But Eliot says that the most remarkable poems are not those of adolescence, when people followed only the way of writing of the period. The most important poems of literature are those of the period of maturity because man crosses the traditions and researches an individual way of writing. Eliot says that “tradition is a matter of much wider significance”. This proposition full of importance means that the writer could obtain and possess the literature of the past only by great labour, because he has to understand what the historical sense is. He has to perceive what was the past like to understand the present time he is living in. he has to understand that literature is not only the product of his own period, but also that literature “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order”. The state of being contemporary is in strong relation with the other times of the history and to write a poem the writer has to understand it. “No poet has his meaning alone”. This is the most important statement of the essay because in a few words it explains widely the concept of intertextuality. You cannot understand an artist without putting him into comparison among the dead. When an artist creates something new, he changes all perception of art and of art which preceded it. Art is only harmony between the old and the new and artists have to understand what came before to make something new.