TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT (1920)

Argumentative text

•·         Objective: criticize the negative attitude to tradition of poets

•·         Addressee: Eliot's previous and contemporary poets

•·         Content:            

•a.       Thesis: Eliot's contemporary poets believe that their aim as poets is to find something isolated in order to be enjoyed.

•b.      Argumentation: Eliot believes that in order to be good at writing a poet needs a requirement to know the traditional ways of poetry as well as the historical methodologies. Any form of art cannot be completed without looking back at the past.

In order to Eliot tradition does not consist in following the previous generation's poets, but it is a matter of much wider significance. It involves the historical sense. A work of art has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. Eliot pinpoints in the present extract that tradition is what makes a writer traditional.

In order to T. S. Eliot no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. The present statement expresses T. S. Eliot point of view which seems to anticipate intertextuality. Such statement also provides a procedure: the meaning of a poet, T. S. Eliot seems to say, depends largely on his relationship with the dead poets.

Contrasts and comparisons are the two reference points to evaluate a work of art. This is

T. S. Eliot's aesthetic principal.

When a work of art enters the artistic circuit it allows a new vision of the circuit which includes the new and the old. This happens because T. S. Eliot believed in the concept of simultaneity which included also a simultaneous order.

When a new work of art is created the existing order must be redefined in order to maintain conformity between the old and the new.

Eliot puts into question the way in which literature is conceive of. The present extract deals with the concept of tradition. Mr Eliot takes to consideration the work that an individual poet writes and the relationship that the work has with all what have been written before.

Tradition cannot be inherited, if a poet wants it he must obtain it by great labour. The introduction of a new work modified the balance between all the previous forms of art. Like when a new baby is born, he or she changes the balance in the family.

I think Eliot is a great innovator, a deep analysis of previous works of art can make people better understand the real essence of life. His language is complicate and difficult for common people and in order to better understand his conception of poetry it is useful to analyse in depth his works. Intertextuality is the most frequent technique in Eliot's poetry. 

It is important to notice how T. S. Eliot integrates other cultures in his works: such integration implies that modernism is a cosmopolitan movement.