Tradition and the Individual Talent.

750 Words3 Pages
Tradition and The Individual Talent - CRITICAL SUMMARY IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archæological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archæology. The essay Tradition and Individual Talent was first published in 1919, in the Times Literary Supplement, as a critical article. It is a declaration of Eliot’s critical creed, and these principles are the basis of all his subsequent criticism. In T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he proposes what he feels are the proper method’s for a new artist to assimilate themselves into the literary tradition that has come before them. T. S. Eliot is mainly concerned with what he describes as the tradition of poetry. In Eliot’s opinion, a poet is not an individual separate from the rest of literary history. A poet cannot in a sense make original art without being conscious of the entire past of literature, and how his art relates to that past. For Eliot, the past is still a dynamic entity that shapes the way poetry should be written and interpreted. Its Three Parts : The essay is divided into three parts. The first part gives us Eliot’s concept of tradition, and in the second part is developed his theory of the impersonality of poetry. The short, third part is in the nature of a conclusion, or summing up of the whole discussion. Eliot’s
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