TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT (1920) T. S. Eliot

NOTES

QUOTATION: <<No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.>>

The sentence seems to anticipate intertextuality. The statement provide a procedure in which the meaning of the poet depends on his relationship with the “dead poets”. Contrast and comparison are two reference points to evaluate and analyse a work of art.

This is Eliot’s aesthetic principle. In addition, he says this 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 the literary circuit, it allows a new vision of the whole circuit, which includes the new and the old; this happens because T. S. Eliot believed in the concept of SIMULTANEITY which included also simultaneous order. The existing order is modified by the insertion of something new.