Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot is a significant essay that explores the relationship between tradition and the creative process in poetry. Eliot argues that understanding tradition is essential for effective literary criticism, positing that a poet's work is deeply intertwined with the contributions of past writers. He emphasizes that a poet should not only express individuality but also engage in a continual dialogue with the literary heritage. This engagement is described as a "continual surrender" to tradition, where the poet's personal identity is transformed through their art.
Eliot introduces the concept of depersonalization, suggesting that the poet serves as a medium for complex emotions rather than merely expressing personal feelings. He likens the poet's mind to a catalyst that processes various influences to create new art, illustrating that genuine poetry emerges from a deliberate distancing of personal emotion. The essay ultimately asserts that the full significance of a poet's work is revealed only in relation to the body of literary tradition, challenging the notion of individuality in the creative process. This work has had a profound impact on literary criticism and continues to resonate in discussions about the role of tradition in art.
Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1919 (collected in Selected Essays, 1932, 1950)
Type of work: Essay
The Work
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” one of Eliot’s early essays, typifies his critical stance and concerns; it has been called his most influential single essay. Divided into three parts, appearing in The Egoist in September and December, 1919, the essay insists upon taking tradition into account when formulating criticism—“aesthetic, not merely historical criticism.”
Eliot opens the essay by revivifying the word “tradition” and arguing that criticism, for which the French were then noted more than the English, in his view “is as inevitable as breathing.” The first principle of criticism that he asserts is to focus not solely upon what is unique in a poet but upon what he shares with “the dead poets, his ancestors.” This sharing, when it is not the mere and unquestioning following of established poetic practice, involves the historical sense, a sense that the whole of literary Europe and of one’s own country “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
A correlative principle is that no poet or artist has his or her complete meaning in isolation but must be judged, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. As Eliot sees it, the order of art is complete before a new work of art is created, but with that new creation all the prior works forming an ideal order are modified, and the order itself is altered.
One of the essay’s memorable and enduring phrases concerns the objection that the living know so much more than the dead writers could have: Eliot counters by asserting, “Precisely, and they are that which we know.” In gaining that knowledge, the artist engages in a “continual surrender” to tradition, and his or her progress “is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” The definition of depersonalization that Eliot offers forms another of the essay’s enduring phrases: As the novelist Gustave Flaubert and the English critic Walter Pater had written before him, Eliot seeks a scientific base for his works and likens the poet’s mind to “a bit of finely filiated platinum . . . introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.”
The poet’s mind, then, is a catalyst, as Eliot explains it in the essay’s second part. His point is that the poet’s transforming mind stores up feelings, phrases, and images until all the particles that can form a new work of art come together to do so. The poet has not so much a personality to express as a medium for the expression of complex emotion that is separable from the poet’s own emotions. Poetry, Eliot emphasizes, is not a turning loose of personal emotion but a consciously deliberate escape from it. The emotion of art, he reminds his readers in the essay’s final section, is impersonal.
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Browne, Elliott Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.
Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.
Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.
Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.