In 1920 T.S.Eliot wrote the essay Tradition and the Individusl Talent.
It is an argumentative text, which dues to the new approach with poetry and it is also a criticism about tradition, it concerns Eliot's attitude to tradition and his conception of the impersonality of literature, in particular the essay deals with the relationship between the work of the individual poet and that of the poets who wrote before him.
Right from the start of the argumentative text, Eliot doesn't affirm immediately the thesis, in fact at the beginning he proposes the issue and people's point of view. In this way he gives different positions about tradition, and criticize them adding his thesis: "we shall often find that 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" in this way Eliot shows the importance of INTERTEXTUALITY. To emphasize his thesis, he provides an analysis of the meaning "tradition"
Eliot believes that only when an artist grows old he can innovate, because he has reached the awareness of the historical sense by "great labour".
So the historical sense is the sense of timeless. When a work is set in a context, therefore it is temporal and become timeless at the same time. It gains the role of a traditional work of art.
The second part of the argumentation deals with the relationship between poets of the past and the present "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists" , according to this affirmation, Eliot concludes that the presents includes the past.
People who live in the present, it is connected unconsciously with the past, and even if people try to break traditional culture with the present, the past will be always a part of our lives.
Eliot wants to represent how it changed the way to conceive what was innovative,
his contribution to criticism, puts into question how art is conceived.
The essay discusses the attitude of Eliot in literature, to express the tradition and how tradition should be used. It takes into consideration a relationship between poem and an individual writer, and the relationship between his work with what poets living before him.
In the second part of the essay there's a relevant statement which expresses T.S.Eliot point of view, which seems to anticipate intertextuality. The statement provides a procedure of the meaning of the poet, T.S. Eliot seems to say that depends largerly on his relationship with the "dead poets".
Contrasts and comparisons are two references to evaluate a work of art. This principle, the esthetic principle, is not only an historical principle. The essay continues with a further statement that allows a better and more precise evaluation of an artist and his/her production. When a new work of art therefore enters in 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 includes a simultaneous order.
The image of monuments wants to figure those values which go beyond history.
The concept of "NEW" deals with the individual use of language, which has a intelligible meaning, an universal meaning.