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Prose

Notes 30.3 Analysis

Tradition and Individual Talent” is the essay of lasting significance in the history of modern
criticism. The essay brought into being two principal aspects of Eliot’s critical domain – tradition
and impersonality in art and poetry, that rated over the realm of criticism. The essay also brings
forth Eliot’s views on the inter–relation between traditional and individual talent. The essay brought
into being the new approach with poets of everlasting significance and it also provided the
parameters for the assessment of the genius and the shortcomings of the masters but contributed
to the history of English Literature. The idea of tradition with all its magnificence, has a meaning
beyond the conventional sense of term. It begins with a historical sense and goes on acquiring new
dimensions along political and cultural dimension, and this creates a system of axes for the
assessment of the worth and genius of a poet.The idea of Eliot’s theory of tradition is based on the
inevitable phenomenon of the continuity of the values during the process called civilization. Eliot
beings with a description that makes tradition a term of abuse and develops to a metaphor of
unquestionable authenticity. ‘Seldom perhaps’, he says, ‘does the word appear except in a phrase
of censure’. He further says :You can hardly make the word aggreable to English ears without this
comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.The above quoted lines from one of the
most celebrated critical endeavours make it clear that Eliot aims at developing a new concept and
structuring a new approach to the very phenomenon called poetry. Eliot, after beginning with the
seemingly derogatory implications of the term imparts a new meaning and magnificence to the
term when he identifies tradition with historical sense. The identification discussed above makes
it clear that the tradition according to Eliot is something more than mere conglomeration of dead
works. The identification of tradition with historical sense serves to ratify the stature of tradition
in assessing the works and function of pets and poetry. He elaborates the idea of historical sense
and says : and the historical sense invokes a perception not only of the partners of the past but also of its
presence : The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones but
with a feeling that whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of
his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.Eliot in the above
quoted line puts forth a dynamic manifestation of tradition which shapes the minds of different
poets of different generation. Eliot also inkles that the poet’s conformity into tradition is an act of
rigorous intellectual efforts that constitute a poet in him. Eliot further defines the idea of historical
sense and says : The historical sense which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and of
timeless and temporal together, is what makes a writer tradition. And it is at the same time what makes a
writer most acute by conscious of his place in time of his contemporaneity .The excerpt from the essay
makes it clear that Eliot pus the whole term in a much wider context than it is otherwise used
before. Eliot takes tradition to be an embodiment of values and beliefs shared by a race which
leads to the idea that there is a process of natural selection and rejection. The values and the belief
that die with the passage of time are subject to rejection. The values and beliefs that constitute the
tradition are living one with capacity of mutual interaction. The old and the new interpenetrate
and this interpenetration results into a new order defined in terms of the simultaneous existence
of the values of the past and the present. The survival of past ratifies the presentness of it. The
simultaneous existence of the past and the present, of the old and the new. It is, thus, evident that
the poet is guided chiefly by the dynamics of the tradition. Eliot further elaborates: No poet, no
artist has a complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation in the appreciation of his relation to
the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone, you must set him from contrast and comparison
among the dead.
Eliot reaffirms that the poet, in order to survive as a poet must invite close contrast and comparison
with the dead poets. Unless, a poet is capable of doing that he ceases to matter in the history of
poetry. Richard Shusterman rightly observes that the ‘enduring demands preserved in a tradition
make it capable of functioning as a synchronize structural system’. Raman Selden observes that
‘the standard theories of literature often combine these apparently disparate modes of thinking’.

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