Tradition and the Individual Talent is one of the most important works of literary criticism by T.S. Eliot. Its aim is to make the reader understand Eliot’s point of view on the poetry’s major issues.

The intelligent reader understands that Tradition and the Individual Talent  is an argumentative text. Right from the start the essayist introduced his thesis underlining that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”  This statement is very significant : according to Eliot’s opinion the great poet has to recognize the importance of the dead poets.  “And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.” Analysing this statement from the syntactical point of view the intelligent reader understands that Eliot immediately qualifies his statement in order to avoid misapprehensions ( “and I do not mean”) .The reader can understand that  Eliot wants to be very clear in order to persuade his audience to accept his point of view on poetry. The essayist also precises that only some of dead poets’s works can be considered an example: only the ones that belong to the period of poet’s maturity.Going on analysing the essay Eliot focuses his attention on tradition’s concept. 

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” 

According to Eliot’s opinion tradition  represents a "simultaneous order," a fusion of past and present. The poet must embrace the whole literature including Homer. Going on the essayist states that “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaing alone”. It means that a poet has a meaning only if he is inserted in a historical and social background. A great poet is the result of the past works and this process is inevitable. Novelty is only possible through tradition and the inclusion of the new work of art alters the way in which past is seen: ” What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” 

The intelligent reader understands that a work can be considered new when it brings all the past in a new way, readjusting its values.