Traditional and individual talent by T.S.ELIOT....

Introduction

T.S Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent’ defending the role of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. He explains that a good poet is one who keeps tradition as well as his own generation in his writing. It was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist and soon after included in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920). His 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.

Tradition

Eliot begins the essay by pointing out that the word ‘tradition’ is a word that is disagreeable to the English who praise a poet for those aspects of his work which are ‘individual’ and original. According to Eliot, Tradition does not mean a blind adherence to or slavish imitation of the ways of the previous generations. Tradition in the true sense of the term cannot be inherited, it can only be obtained by hard labour. This labour is the labour of knowing the past writers.

Tradition, Eliot states, represents a knowledge of a historical sense, i.e. a feeling of history leading back to Homer that appears in the original artist’s work. The artist combines her/his temporal experience with that of the timelessness of all literature. Indeed, states Eliot, no artist has significance alone; it is derived from his/her relation to those who have come before. When the new art is released into history, continues Eliot, it, having been influenced by historical art, also influence past works in relation to the new addition to the whole. Art never changes, but the material of art keeps it new.

Impersonality of poetry

Eliot compares the mind of the poet to a catalyst and the process of poetic creation to the process of a chemical reaction. When a piece of platinum is introduced into a vapour chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide, the two combine to form sulphuric acid, but the platinum remains unchanged. The poet’s mind is this platinum, the catalytic agent. The emotions and feelings are sulphur and oxygen. The poet’s mind is necessary for new combinations of emotions and experiences to take place, but it itself does not undergo any change during the process of poetic combination.

According to him “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". The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. He suggests that the fusion that takes place between the poet’s mind, emotion, and feeling makes art — not the poet’s personality, but her/his medium. By way of example, Keats feelings and reactions to the nightingale have nothing to do with the bird itself, but the bird, possibly because of its estimation in society, was able to evoke those feelings on that particular occasion.