Notes about T.S. Eliot's Essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (20/3/12)

The extract is taken from T.S. Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1919.
The essay belongs to Mr Eliot's literary criticism, a form of writing that discusses literature and the most important problems of it.
The main topic of the essay, that explains Eliot's attitude to tradition, is what makes a work of art innovative.
The writer begins analysing the differences between a poet and his predecessors and he writes that there is a relationship between the poets of all the times. In this way the essayst denies people's thought that a work of art is something unique. A classical work has the simultaneous concept of time of Modernism because it was written in the past but in it there is also the sense of all stories.
The writer supports that in a work of art there must be the presence of the previous poet in their period of full maturity because people in middle age analyze their life until that moment.
Modernist literature is inclusive and impersonal because it refers to every person in the world (cosmopolitsm). So the real work of art must be intertextual and intercultural.
The thesis the writer supports is that a real work of art shows tradition.
The essayst writes that it is necessary that a writer comprehends what it was written before him, that is to take with him what there was before. So the innovative poet shows also the past, but not copying: he understands the past and tradition and he takes possesion of them.
Eliot talks also about a "historical sense": it is the sense of history and it must belong to the person. In this way people are able to read in the text its past and the sense of all stories. The work of art in this way is out of the time, but it is also son of its time because it was written in a defined period.