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Tradition and the Individual Talent
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Themes
Tradition as Present and Past
Tradition is not only the first word in the title, it is also Eliot’s first topic in the essay. The primacy that he gives to tradition in poetry and art establishes the framework within which Eliot’s theories emerge. The poet’s obligation to tradition is to know it. To write only from individual experience is to limit oneself to a fraction of possible material. He argues that to get beyond themselves, poets must develop a historical sense—a sense of those who came before. Paradoxically, the most individual characteristics of a poem may be those drawn from dead poets but made new by writers of the present. Attention to tradition creates this type of novel poetry.
The historical sense is more than a sense of what has passed. It is timelessness, always past and present. When poets are rooted in tradition, they inhabit a timeless realm because they are, Eliot writes, “more acutely conscious of [their] place in time, of [their] own contemporaneity” (37). Eliot’s theories of time also change how the present views the past: “[T]he past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (37). Tradition is reciprocal from past to present and present to past.
Tradition is the source all art draws from. Romantic poets sought to bring poetry to the common man. In the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1802), William Wordsworth writes that poets should “choose incidents and situations from the common life” for their poetry. In Wordsworth’s estimation, poetry should contain “a selection of language really used by men” (“British Romanticism.” Poetry Foundation, 2022). Eliot, by contrast, emphasizes knowledge of the past: “What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career” (39). The past must be invited to the contemporary conversation. A poet must consider the past, know it, and apply it to his or her work. The consciousness of tradition is essential to the maturity of the artist and their creative process. Without it, the artist would be limited to personal experience.
Individuality and Depersonalization
The title of the essay seems to set the themes of tradition and individuality against each other. Yet Eliot’s thesis is more nuanced than that. While he disparages mere novelty, he argues that a poet’s true identity will emerge when they find a way to join tradition and individuality in their writing. Eliot says, “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (39). In opposition to Wordsworth, who focused on individual experience, Eliot suggests that a mature poet will practice depersonalization or the separation of the poet’s suffering from the material of the poem in order to “digest and transmute” those emotions, feelings, and passions into the material of the poem (40).
Eliot calls the poet to embrace a paradox: “[Poetry] 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” (42). To know oneself and yet to set that knowledge aside for the sake of the poem demonstrates maturity of creative faculty. This maturity allows poets to freely use but not be bound to their personalities.
The Nature of Poetry and Art
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” defines poetry in quasi-scientific terms: a fusion of elements in the presence of a catalyst. While poetry contains emotions and feelings, they are not inherently (or at all) those of the poet. They are composites, new combinations born from the poet’s interaction with the past and the present. Poetry is not limited by the personality of the poet. It uses ordinary emotions and combines them in such a way that they form a feeling or emotion unique to the poem. This separation of the poem from the author is Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry” (39). This poem-poet separation has implications in criticism as well. Eliot states, “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” (39). Critique or praise is not a judgment of the poet’s personality.
For Eliot, the poem is not a replication of experiences or events. He invites the art or poem to speak for itself and allows for the possibility that individual poems converse with one another almost independently of authorship, event, or personal background. This theory runs concurrently with Eliot’s definition of tradition: each poem joins and contributes to the millennia-old conversation about meaning and value.
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By T. S. Eliot
