The text I’m going to analyze is an extract from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” written by T.S. Eliot in 1920. It is one of his best essays that deals with Eliot’s attitude to tradition and literature.

Right from the title the intelligent reader can understand that the essay will concern the relationship between a writer and traditional literature. As a result he/she will expect to find out Eliot’s opinion on the theme he has suggested in the title.

Eliot begins his essay setting against two opposite opinions on the concept of “great poetry”. On one side,  ordinary people enjoy the production of a great poet only if it differs from the predecessors, “especially his immediate predecessors”.  He declares that common people appreciate novelties. On the other hand, he believes that  a real innovative poet is the one who shows his sense of belonging to tradition. He asserts that if only ordinary people would approach a poet without prejudice they would find out that the best part of poetry is the one recalling the poet’s ancestors. In those parts” the ancestors assert their immortality”. In particular he adds that great poetry should not refer the traditional mature literary production. This means that an innovative poet should not consider t his/her ancestors’ adolescence production, but the fully matured one. In the following lines he clarifies that poets should not deal with traditional poetry “in a blind or timid adherence”. Moreover they should not make reference just to the immediate generation before them.  Such principles are seen to many times in T.S. Eliot’s society and so in that case “novelty is better than repetition”.  The use of the word “repetition”  rather than “tradition” is not casual. It is referred to poets who makes use of traditional poetry in a superficial way. As a consequence it is not worth to call it tradition. According to T.S. Eliot “Tradition is a matter of much wider significance”. He clarifies that tradition cannot be inherited. It must be obtained by great labor. In the following lines T.S. Eliot says that tradition involves the historical sense. In particular he says that such feature is indispensable to anyone who wants to will keep on being a poet beyond his twenty-fifth  year. The historical sense involves the perception of both past and present. Furthermore it compels the poet to write not merely to his own country in his own generation, but to the entire world and to every generation. Such principle is typical of Modernist  production. T.S. Eliot defines the historical sense as a sense of timeless and temporal. This feature makes the writer traditional and “more conscious of his place and time, of his own contemporaneity”. The writer says that in order to judge a poet’s composition, we must compare him to his predecessors. We cannot simply value him alone. According to T.S. Eliot when a new work of art is created it simultaneously modifies the poet’s predecessors’ composition. In order to clarify this concept we need to imagine to have a mathematic expression. When we add more and more addends (the new works of art) to the expression (the world’s literature history) the solution (our present) changes. As a consequence T.S. Eliot states that the past can alter the present and vice versa. The final line of the extract can be considered a warning to the poet: “And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities”. This line clarifies that after all the poet who will follow his suggestions will find great difficulties and responsibilities.