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Unit 30: Eliot-Tradition And Individual Talent...

(b) ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ Notes
(c) ’A Note on Twentieth Century Literature’
(d) None of the Above
5. T. S. Eliot defines poetry as ……
(a) “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its origins from emotion
recollected in tranquility.
(b) “Not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality.”
(c) “A metrical composition which is a blissful blend of emotions and intellect.
(d) None of the above

30.4 Summary

• Thus, Eliot denounces the romantic criticism of the nineteenth century (particularly
Wordsworth’s theory of poetry); second, it underlines the importance of ‘tradition’ and
examines the correlation between ‘tradition’ and ‘individual talent’ and finally, it announces
the death of the author (i.e., the empirical author, the author in the biographical sense of
term) and shifts the focus from the author to the text.
• Tradition and Individual Talent” is one of the more well known works that T. S. Eliot has
produced in his critic capacity. It formulates Elliot’s conception of the relationship between
the poet and the literary tradition which precedes him.
• In “Tradition and Individual Talent” Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the
definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. He wishes to correct for the fact that, as he
perceives it, “in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply
its name in deploring its absence.”
• Eliot posits that, though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses
through change - a separation from tradition, literary advancements are instead recognized
only when they conform to the tradition.Eliot, a classicist, felt that the true incorporation of
tradition into literature was unrecognised, that tradition, a word that “seldom…..appear in
phase of censure”, was actually a thus-far unrealized element of literary criticism.
• For Eliot, the term “tradition” is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents
a “simultaneous order,” by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and
present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody “the
whole of the literature of Europe from Homer,” while, simultaneously, expressing his
contemporary environment. Eliot challenges our common perception that a poet’s greatness
and individuality lies in his departure from his predecessors. Rather, Eliot argues that “the
most individual parts of his (the poet) work may be those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot claims that this “historical sense,”
that is, not only a resemblance to traditional works, but an awareness and understanding of
their relation to his poetry.
• But, this fidelity to tradition does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of
surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception
of the poetic process. Novelty is possible, and only possible, through tapping into tradition.
When a poet engages in the creation of new work, he realizes an aesthetic “ideal order,” as
it has been established by the literary tradition that has come before him. As such, the act of
artistic creation does not take place in a vacuum. The introduction of a new work alters the
cohesion of this existing order, and causes a readjustment of the old in order to accommodate
the new. Thus, the inclusion of the new work alters the way in which the past is seen,

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