Tradition and the Individual Talent

When Eliot wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the world was less than one year beyond WWI, and the 1918 flu pandemic was causing widespread sickness and death. New ideas in philosophy and economics were transforming geopolitics, and scientific innovations and doubt rippled out into the religious and psychological spheres. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) came to represent Modernist poetic values of fragmentation, complexity, allusion, and unsentimentality. The “narrative method,” the literary technique of telling a story linearly, ceased to make sense after the devastation of the war and the upheaval of belief systems. These literary devices—fragmentation, allusion, and free verse—allowed the Modernists to analyze and express the anarchy and chaos that they witnessed. Eliot’s literary criticism grew out of the Modernist experience of doubt and making history new. His attention to tradition and theories of poetics resonated with many poets of his time. The themes of the essay speak to this new movement within literature, a separation not only of the personal from the poetic but a separation of the Modernist generation from the cultural ideals of the Romantics.