MCorte - T.S.Eliot's Output and Metaphysical Poetry - Tradition and The Individual Talent

 This is an extract from the essay "Tradition and the individual talent" by Thomas Stern Eliot in 1920. That is one of his most important essays and it concerns Eliot's attitude to tradition and his conception of literature. In the extract Eliot deals with the value of tradition, mostly related to the relationships of the work of poet with the other poets before him/her.
This kind of text is an essay and Eliot wants to expose an argument, discussing and argumenting it. In fact Eliot show a thesis related to the main topic of his text(in this case tradition) and also writes argumentations to prove his opinions.
Firstly, Eliot is going to demonstrate his concept of tradition. According to Eliot, people tend to value and judge works of a poet, only trying to find his differences with previous generation; that is considering only individual aspects. But Eliot points out tradition is not repeating same concepts or it should be discouraged.
Passing to the real concept of tradition, Eliot indicates the connection between tradition and historical sense: historical sense can be defined as a perception of the past and its role in the present. If a poet can perceive historical sense, he can feel sense of timeless literature, that is the whole European literature is in simultaneous existence and simultaneous order and time. The main sense of those argumentations is that Eliot wants to show poetry of an individual cannot be defined only from his/her individual aspects; but it is also equally important to find a meaning in his/her poetry analyzing the consciousness of connection with the past poets, valuing for contrast and comparison. So tradition is defined as consciousness of simultaneous time and ability to catch how an artist expressing his time.
But Eliot doesn't' only focus on the meaning of tradition but it wants also to explain why past and tradition are so important. All works make a some kind of order(as called by Eliot) but when a new work of art is made, the order still survives but it readjusted as the all works of art. According to Eliot this can be defined as conformity between the old and the new. The final conclusion from Eliot is that past and present are not distinguished because they are in strict relationship: one influences another and one alters another. This is the main awareness of the poet.
After analyzing this essay, I'd like to give my opinion. This was a text really interesting and also quite particular even if I don't know the reason why. Up to know, Eliot is a quite interesting literary man and I like his writings . In this text I liked how he presented his concept of tradition and also relationships between past and present, that is the concept of timeless. Last one is the best part of the essay, according to me; in fact I really appreciated how a work of art depends from individual but also from his/her relationships with other poets, that are always important points of reference; no one can consider his/her work totally independent even if revolutionary.