Traditonal and Individual Talent

In the extract T.S. Eliot discusses his attitude to tradition and what a writer should do to be innovative.

T. S. Eliot's essay is not arranged into paragraphs, nevertheless the present text follows logical argumentations which allow the intelligent reader to understand it is organized into three parts:

- 1st part : According to T.S. Eliot in an innovative work of art the artist has to insert traditions of all his previous predecessor, especially his immediate ones (--> THESIS). In this way the artist/poet should often find that "not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poet, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously".

- 2nd part: Tradition is not merely repetition of the "immidiately generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes". Tradition has a "wider significance"(--> FIRST ARGUMENTATION). It involves primarily THE HISTORICAL SENSE which is indispensable to all writers who would contine to compose beyond the twenty-fifth years. Indeed, through the historical sense, the poet can see more clearly not only the pastness but also the presence of the past. This means that a man of letter feels the whole of the literature of Europe, of his own country and therefore "a simultaneous existence and a simultaneous order". So the historical sense is composed of all timeless and temporal values making a writer traditional. In addition the historical sense makes the writer more conscios of his own contemporaneity.

- 3rd part: "No poet, no artist of any art, has hsi complete meaning alone" (--> SECOND ARGUMENTATION). The statment provides a procedure: the weaning of a poem depends largly ON HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE "DEAD POETS". "Contrast and comparison" are two reference points to evaluate a work of art. This is T.S. Eliot's "AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE", which is not only an historical principle. Moreover, when a new work of art enters the ARTISTIC CIRCUIT, it slightly alter the existing order. However the novelty allows a new vision of the circuit which includes the new and the old. It follows that "the relations, the proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted".