Tradition and the Individual Talent

“One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.”

At the beginning of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot notes the tendency of previous and perhaps current critics to value individuality above tradition. Eliot proposes a new way to approach writing and reading poetry: depersonalization. Later, he uses a parallel structure to challenge the idea that something must be “isolated in order to be enjoyed” by proposing that poetry is a fusion and combination rather than an isolation of personality traits.

“Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.”

This seems, at first, a paradox: Individuality emerges from a writer when they are immersed in tradition. Paradox illuminates the contrast with how past poets may have viewed tradition and makes it clear that utilizing the material of those who came before is not a crutch for the poet but a mark of maturity.

“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. […] [N]ovelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”

The words “tradition” and “novelty” in this context allude to Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets who viewed novelty as part of personality and tradition as repetition. Eliot uses their words to create a new definition and, in the process, models the layering of history he proposes in the essay.