Tradition And The Individual Talent is an essay written by T. S. Eliot that deals with the value of tradition, especially  with the relationship between the work of the individual poet and that of the poets who wrote before him.

T. S. Eliot asserts bluntly, right from the start, his thesis, that is a work of art is more innovative if in its structure there is the presence of ancient works. But immediately he specifies that he does not refer to works written during adolescence, because it is the age most sensitive to suggestions, but to the period of full maturity.

After that T. S. Eliot, in order to render better what he has just stated, uses the image of sand: if you write works of art only influenced by the experiences recently experienced, these works, including literary currents, are destined to get lost among the desert sand.

For this reason, the tradition is not just following the ways of the immediate generation before us (in T. S. Eliot's case Victorian poets) because the novelty is preferred to repetition. After that T. S. Eliot supports his statement, explaining what tradition is:

1.     it cannot be inherited, you must to conquer it by great labour.

2.     it involves the historical sense which in turn implies simultaneity (the awareness of past and of present): so the sense of history is therefore outside of the time. It renders the writer aware of time in which he/she lives (how the past is present in the present).

At this point T. S. Eliot reiterates his thesis: “no poet has his complete meaning alone”, “his significant is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets”: these statements seem to anticipate intertextuality.

For the first time in the present essay T. S. Eliot writes an explicit reference to the aesthetic movement; this principle allows to have canons (contrast and comparison) to evaluate esthetically a work of art. In addition he says that this principle is not only an historical principle.

T. S. Eliot concludes his essay talking about the relationship between past and present. Before creating a work of art there was an order (past), but this order is altered when you develops a new work of art (present), because referring in your work to the dead poets, you change the order previously established, even if only slightly. Thus “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted”, the poet, therefore, must be aware of the difficulties and responsibilities that await him. This happens because T. S. Eliot believed in the concept of simultaneity, which includes also a simultaneous order.