Tradition and the Individual Talent analysis

Tradition and Individual Talent is a critical essay written by T. S. Eliot in 1920. The essay deals with the value of tradition, in particular with the relationship between the work of the individual poet and that of the poets who wrote before him. The essay is composed by two parts: the first part includes Eliot's thesis and the argumentations supporting his opinion about the importance of tradition and history; the second part includes other argumentations about the importance of critical historical analysis of an artist.

In this essay Eliot takes into consideration what an individual poet writes and the relationship his work creates with what the poets living before him wrote. Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. In this essay Eliot supports a thesis with some argumentations, in order to make the reader understand Eliot's attitude to tradition and his conception of the impersonality of literature.

The thesis that Eliot proposes is that we shall not find only the best, but the most individual parts of the work of the poet. According to Eliot a poet should be timeless: he has to express the feelings of "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously, expressing his contemporary environment.

Going on reading Eliot claims that the "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and an understanding of their relation to modern poetry. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channeled and elaborated. Eliot explains that a "mature" poet's mind works by being a passive "receptacle" of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new "art emotion."

In the second part of the essay there is a relevant statement which express T. S. Eliot point of view which seems to anticipate intertextuality. The statement provides a procedure: the meaning of the poet, T. S. Eliot seems to say, depends largely on his relationship with the "dead poets". Contrast and comparison are two reference points to evaluate a word of art. This is T. S. Eliot's esthetic principle. In addition he says that this principle is not only an historical principle. The essay continues with a further statement that allows a better and a more precise evaluation of an artist and his or her production. When a new work of art therefore enters the artist 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 includes also a simultaneous order.

Eliot concludes his essay saying that the poet, who can alter the past knowing that the present is directed by the past, has to aware of the great difficulties and responsibilities.