T.S Eliot Criticism

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 09A

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T. S. ELIOT “TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT” (1917) Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 761-764. Eliot’s goal in this essay is to underscore the “importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors” (762) (this is what has traditionally been called ‘literary history’ and, more recently, ‘intertextuality’), and to stress, using an organic metaphor, that poetry is a “living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written” (my emphasis; 762). Eliot argues that, as critics, we tend to “insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else” (761). In other words, we “pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man” (761) by dwelling upon the poet’s “difference from his predecessors” (761). Eliot’s view is, however, that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (761). The greatest writers, Eliot asserts, write with a “historical sense” (761) in their bones, to wit, the “perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (761). This 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 country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (761). As a result, no poet or artist “has his complete meaning alone” (761). His “significance . . . is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists” (761). It is for this reason that Eliot advises critics that “you must set him, for comparison and contrast, among the dead” (761). Eliot’s sexism ought to be obvious from his choice of pronouns. Eliot’s point is that the...