Analysis Of Tradition And The Individual Talent By T. S. Eliot

The text “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was written by T. S. Eliot and is about the role of tradition and of the old writers and writings in the development and critique of the new generation of writers.
The author begins talking about the difficulty of England people of using the word “tradition” without relating it to the science of archaeology and it is more likely to appear in a phrase of censure. In the following paragraph, he critiques the tendency of following the habit or critical method of the French, picturing them as more critical (and, as a peculiar advantage, less spontaneous than the English), forgetting that “the criticism is as inevitable as breathing” and states that if we gave up on the insistence of finding what is

This historical sense involves perception, “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer […] has a simultaneous existence”, it is a sense of the timeless and of the temporal (and both together) and that defines a traditional writer; no poet has complete meaning alone, it is important to be related to the dead poets and artists. In addition, understanding the close connection between past and present makes the poet to realize his responsibilities and difficulties, also to accept that he must be “judged by the standards of the past”.
T.S Eliot sets out the fact, for him obvious, that art does not improve, it is a development that does not abandon nothing (nor Shakespeare or Homer), and that “the mind of his own country”, a collective mind, is, for the artist, more important than a “private mind”. The difference between past and present is that “the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show”, thus the poet duty should be to develop his consciousness of the past throughout his career and

Thus, the mind of the poet seizes and stores uncountable feelings, phrases and images until they are able to form a new compound. A great poetry varies in its types of combination and it is the intensity of the artistic process that is relevant to it.
The author affirms that a poet has a particular medium, not a personality, to express, a medium in which experiences and impressions are combined and these may or may not play an important part in the man, the personality. The personal emotions of a poet don’t turn him special, remarkable, but the way he uses ordinary emotions into poetry “to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.” “Poetry is an escape from emotion”.
In conclusion, the essay, and its practical conclusions, was made to be used by people interested in poetry and T. S. Eliot emphasizes that “the emotion of art is impersonal”, the poet must surrender himself to the