Tradition and the Individual Talent

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was among the foremost poets and critics of the 20th century. He was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. His family spent summers at their ancestral home in Massachusetts. Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts and then Harvard, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1909 and a master’s in English literature in 1910. He moved to Paris for a year to attend the Sorbonne, where he sat in on lectures by Charles Maurras and read poetry by Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. These influences shaped his perception of emotion, time, and consciousness. In 1915, he moved to England and spent the remainder of his life there.

Eliot’s work reflects some of the primary concerns of Modernism: fragmentation, time, history, homelessness, and identity. Throughout his life and work, Eliot pursued wholeness and communion. These pursuits appear in both his creative and critical work. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” challenged the norms of literary criticism of his time, redefining the roles of tradition, time, poets, and poems. Eliot’s editorial and critical work reached beyond the readership of his essays. From 1922 to 1939, he edited The Criterion, an intellectual literary journal.