.1
TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL
TALENT
I
I N 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 exc~pt in a phrase of censure. If otherwise~ it is
vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work
approved, of some pleasing archreological reconstruction. You
can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this
comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archreology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations
of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only
its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind~ and is even
more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical
habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we
know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has
appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of
the French: we only conclude (we are such unconscious people)
that the French are "more critical" than we, and sometimes even
plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the
less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind
ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we
should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our
minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for
, T.S. ELIOT: SELECTED ESSA
2
criticizing our own minds in their work of cri!icism. One of the
facts that might come to light in this process 1s our te_ndency !o
insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of h1s work 1n
which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of
his work we pretend to find what is ~ndivi~ual, _what is the
peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with s~usfact_10? upon _the
poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his 1mmed1atc
predecessors; we endea~our to find so~ething that can be
isolated in order to be enJoyed. Whereas 1f we approach a poet
without his prejudice we shall often find that not only _the ~st,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those 1n which
the 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.
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. We have seen many such simple
currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty 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. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense,
which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would
continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of
the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man
to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but
with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from
Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
c?untry has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order. 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. And it is at
the sa~e _time wh~t makes a writer most acutely conscious of his
place 1n time, of h1s contemporaneity.
. No _po~t, no artist_ of any ar~, ~as his complete meaning alone.
His _s1gruficance, his apprec1at1on is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him
TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL
TALENT
I
I N 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 exc~pt in a phrase of censure. If otherwise~ it is
vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work
approved, of some pleasing archreological reconstruction. You
can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this
comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archreology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations
of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only
its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind~ and is even
more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical
habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we
know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has
appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of
the French: we only conclude (we are such unconscious people)
that the French are "more critical" than we, and sometimes even
plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the
less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind
ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we
should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our
minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for
, T.S. ELIOT: SELECTED ESSA
2
criticizing our own minds in their work of cri!icism. One of the
facts that might come to light in this process 1s our te_ndency !o
insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of h1s work 1n
which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of
his work we pretend to find what is ~ndivi~ual, _what is the
peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with s~usfact_10? upon _the
poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his 1mmed1atc
predecessors; we endea~our to find so~ething that can be
isolated in order to be enJoyed. Whereas 1f we approach a poet
without his prejudice we shall often find that not only _the ~st,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those 1n which
the 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.
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. We have seen many such simple
currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty 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. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense,
which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would
continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of
the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man
to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but
with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from
Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
c?untry has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order. 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. And it is at
the sa~e _time wh~t makes a writer most acutely conscious of his
place 1n time, of h1s contemporaneity.
. No _po~t, no artist_ of any ar~, ~as his complete meaning alone.
His _s1gruficance, his apprec1at1on is the appreciation of his
relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him
