Tradition and the Individual Talent is an essay written by T.S. Eliot in 1920. It deals with the concept of tradition and with the way it can influence what it is written.

T.S. Eliot poses a thesis: "Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously". Therefore, according to Eliot, the best parts of a poetry are those that are influenced by ancestors' works. It follows that to create a work of art it is necessary to make reference to traditional culture, contrary to the idea that the greatest poet's satisfaction is based on making something different from his predecessors.

He supported the thesis with some statements: first of all T.S. Eliot guesses that introducing tradition in poets' work does not mean following the ways of the immediate generation before, because tradition consists on inheriting each masterpiece of European culture from Homer on. In order to manage it, the historical sense is indispensable. It "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence" . Therefore Eliot believes in the modernist concept of simultaneity: past and present exist together even in poetry. It follows that the timeless and the temporal should be connected and they are what makes a writer traditional.

Secondly Eliot thinks that to evaluate a poet, you should contrast and compare him with the dead. That is why he has not got meaning alone.

Thirdly it should be related to other masterpieces, because when it is created, it enters the artistic circuit and therefore it modifies the order. Before him, the order was already complete, but then it should be readjusted to recreate conformity between the old and the new.

Finally T.S. Eliot sums up all his idea saying "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past". Therefore poets deal with great difficulties and responsibilities when they write a poem, it involves a great labour.