Bridge Course : T.S.Eliot Tradition and Individual Talent

 T.S.Eliot 

The essay Tradition and the Individual Talent is an attack on certain critical views in Romanticism particularly upon the idea that a poem is primarily an expression of the personality of the poet. Eliot argues that a great poem always asserts and that the poet must develop a sense of the pastness of thepast.

1.How would you like to explain Eliot's concept of Tradition? Do you agree with it?

 Eliot's concept of tradition.Eliot takes the tradition in a positive way as well as in a larger sense. He also points out that following the tradition is not only slavish imitation. The countries and nations try to preserve their tradition as heritage which is essential part of their culture and also handed down from generation to generation. Here one should not merely imitate the tradition but one has to add something new or creative in it and must write with the history in his bones.Tradition is not inherited but it must be acquired with great labor. So we can say that he put emphasizes on mingling the past and present with historical sense.

2) What do you understand by Historical Sense? 

     Eliot explains the concept of tradition with the use of Historical sense.There is quote from his essay on historical sense.

"The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence"

This means that It involves the perception of the presence of the past not only its pastness. It is not only to know about historical fact but mainly it's about that in which way people were living in the past and how that past is presented in the contemporary time. Further, he says that...

This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. 

This means that with the help of historical sense a writer can create a work that has timeless and temporal both together.

3) What is the relationship between “tradition” and “individual talent,” according to the poet T. S. Eliot?

Here the tradition is a matter of much wider significance. The title words of the essay "tradition" and "individual talent" have an interconnection. New writers are not merely imitating the tradition but by their own individual talent, they add something new and creative in already existing history or tradition. They give a new charm and beauty to the tradition.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot advocates for the separation of art from the artist and argues that tradition has less to do with imitation and more to do with understanding and expanding upon the intellectual and literary context in which one is writing. Some of the main points in T.S. Eliot's essay are tradition, isolation, knowledge, and catalyst.