‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who had been living in London for the last few years, and who had published his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. You can read ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ here.
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing – indeed, of much modernism – that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly and more pointedly than previous poets had. This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do. James Joyce looked back to ancient Greek myth (the story of Odysseus) for his novel set in modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours and poets of the Middle Ages. H. D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek references and ideas. As Eliot puts it, ‘Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’ He goes on to argue that a modern poet should write with the literature of all previous ages ‘in his bones’, as though Homer and Shakespeare were his (or her) contemporaries: ‘This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal T. S. Eliot 2and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.’
In short, knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers both part of that tradition and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own poetry, for instance, is simultaneously in the tradition of Homer and Dante and the work of a modern poet, and it is because of his debt to Homer and Dante that he is both modern and traditional. If this sounds like a paradox, consider how Shakespeare is often considered both a ‘timeless’ poet (‘Not of an age, but for all time’, as his friend Ben Jonson said) whose work is constantly being reinvented, but is also understood in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean social and political attitudes. Similarly, in using Dante in his own poetry, Eliot at once makes Dante ‘modern’ and contemporary, and himself – by association – part of the wider poetic tradition.
Eliot’s essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. That is, the poet’s personality does not matter, as it’s the poetry that s/he produces that is important. Famously, he observes: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’
This is more or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement (in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads in 1800) that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. Once again, Eliot sets himself apart from such a Romantic notion of poetry. This is in keeping with his earlier argument about the importance of tradition: the poet’s personality does not matter, only how their work responds to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.
Eliot’s example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet who wrote The Odyssey for certain, but we don’t need to. The Odyssey itself is what matters, not the man (or men – or woman!) who wrote it. Poetry should be timeless and universal, transcending the circumstances out of which it grew, and transcending the poet’s own generation and lifetime. (Eliot’s argument raises an interesting question: can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also be timeless and universal? Evidently it can, as these poets’ works have outlived the poets who wrote them.)
We might also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often incorporated part of themselves into their work – he would do it himself, so that, although it would be naive to read The Waste Land as being ‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his first wife, we can nevertheless see aspects of his marriage informing the poem. And in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Eliot would acknowledge that the poet of poets, Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the Bard ‘was occupied with the struggle – which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal’. For Eliot, great poets turn personal experience into impersonal poetry, but this nevertheless means that their poetry often stems from the personal. It is the poet’s task to transmute personal feelings into something more universal. Eliot is rather vague about how a poet is to do this – leaving others to ponder it at length.
Continue to explore Eliot’s work with our short summary of Eliot’s life, our introduction to his poem The Waste Land, our exploration of what makes his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ so ground-breaking, and our pick of the best biographies and critical studies of Eliot. If you’re studying poetry, we recommend these five helpful guides for the poetry student. Below is a short video written and presented by Dr Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University, which introduces a few of the key themes of Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land. It explores how Eliot’s poem puts his theory of ‘tradition’ into action through using lines from Shakespeare and classical antiquity.
Eliot compares the poet’s mind to a jar or receptacle in which are stored numberless feelings, emotions, etc., which remain there in an unorganised and chaotic form till, “all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” Thus poetry is organisation rather than inspiration. And the greatness of a poem does not depend upon the greatness or even the intensity of the emotions, which are the components of the poem, but upon the intensity of the process of poetic composition. Just as a chemical reaction takes place under pressure, so also intensity is needed for the fusion of emotions. The more intense the poetic process, the greater the poem. There is always a difference between the artistic emotion and the personal emotions of the poet. For example, the famous Ode to Nightingale of Keats contains a number of emotions which have nothing to do with the Nightingale. “The difference between art and the event is always absolute.” The poet has no personality to express, he is merely a medium in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may find no place in his poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may have no significance for the man. Eliot thus rejects romantic subjectivism.
The emotion of poetry is different from the personal emotions of the poet. His personal emotions may be simple or crude, but the emotion of his poetry may be complex and refined. It is the mistaken notion that the poet must express new emotions that results in much eccentricity in poetry. It is not the business of the poet to find new emotions. He may express only ordinary emotions, but he must impart to them a new significance and a new meaning. And it is not necessary that they should be his personal emotions. Even emotions which he has never personally experienced can serve the purpose of poetry. (For example, emotions which result from the reading of books can serve his turn.) Eliot rejects Wordsworth’s theory of poetry having, “its origin in emotions recollected in tranquillity”, and points out that in the process of poetic composition there is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor tranquillity. In the poetic process, there is only concentration of a number of experiences, and a new thing results from this concentration. And this process of concentration is neither conscious nor deliberate; it is a passive one. There is, no doubt, that there are elements in the poetic process which are conscious and deliberate. The difference between a good and a bad poet is that a bad poet is conscious where he should be unconscious and unconscious where he should be conscious. It is this consciousness of the wrong kind which makes a poem personal, whereas mature art must be impersonal. But Eliot does not tell us when a poet should be conscious, and when not. The point has been left vague and indeterminate.
Work Cited
“Tradition and The Individual Talent - CRITICAL SUMMARY.” Neo English System. 8 December 2010. Web. 5 April 2018
“A Short Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Interesting Literature. 21 February 2016. Web. 4 April 2018
