Tradition and individual talent is an argumentative essay written by Thomas Stearns Elliot in
1920. According to the definition of argumentative essay it states a thesis and
develops an argumentation. The thesis advanced by T. S. Elliot in the present
essay is: "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". This statement expresses Elliot's attitude to tradition and his
conception of the impersonality of literature. The writer asserts that
tradition is not following the previous standards and novelty is better than
repetition. According to Elliot tradition involves the historical sense, and
historical sense involves a perception, a feeling that the whole literature has
a simultaneous existence. for this sense Elliot means 
a sense of the timeless and of the temporal together.

Furthermore Elliot states that no work of
art has a complete meaning alone. Elliot asserts that art makes up its meaning
on contrast and comparison. This is T. S. Elliot's aesthetic principle.