Tradition and the Individual Talent

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is an essay by poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). It originally published in two installments of The Egoist, a small London-based literary magazine. Part 1 appeared in the September 1919 issue, and Parts 2 and 3 in the December 1919 issue. The essay was republished in Eliot’s first critical essay collection The Sacred Wood (1920). Since these initial publications, the essay has been anthologized many times. This guide references the version published in Perspecta (1982).

Eliot’s most well-known works of poetry are “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), “The Waste Land” (1922), “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot’s poetry, criticism, and playwriting won a Nobel Prize in 1948. When he wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot was already a well-known poet. In 1917, he published a collection of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, that included the celebrated poem “The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.” Between 1916 and 1920, he published about 100 articles and reviews. Alongside the work of critic I. A. Richards, these essays became the basis for New Criticism, a literary movement that emerged a few decades later. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is intended to give primacy to literary tradition and elevate the text of a poem above the poet’s personality.

Part 1

In Part 1, Eliot establishes the universality and essentiality of tradition in poetry. While we often praise what makes a writer different from others, Eliot argues that individuality is inseparable from tradition: “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (37). Eliot argues that following tradition goes beyond reproducing what came before. Writing with tradition in mind requires the poet to have a sense of their place in literary history, a history that matters because it is both present and past to the writer.

The work of past poets informs a reader’s sense of meaning today. Eliot says that when a new work of art comes into the world “the existing order” adjusts to its presence. He writes, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (37). The poet will be judged by standards that are shaped by poetry’s history. This doesn’t mean a poet’s work must conform to the past but that the work’s meaning will inevitably be interpreted in light of its adherence or deviance from its predecessors. The poet must be conscious of the ideas that have carried through history, learning that “art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same” (38). The mind of a country, as with an individual, constantly changes but it “abandons nothing en route” (38). Eliot argues that poets must pursue knowledge throughout their lives.

He asserts further that this pursuit requires “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (39). Eliot names this process “depersonalization,” and at the end of Part 1, he introduces an analogy: “I therefore invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide” (39).

Part 2

To begin Part 2, Eliot writes that criticism and appreciation are “directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” (39). In other words, poetry is impersonal and separate from its author, and every poem draws from the whole of poetry. The mark of a mature poet, Eliot says, is the poet’s perfect command of the medium of the poem and the “liberty to enter into new combinations” of feelings and ideas (39).

Eliot then returns to the analogy that ended Part 1 and explains that platinum is unaffected by the chemical reaction but necessary for it. He argues that the more mature or “perfect” the poet, “the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (40).

He argues that the artist’s material is of two kinds: “emotions and feelings” (40). Emotions and feelings alone don’t create art, but their presence alongside the poet’s artistic process—the inert element—can provide the environment needed for a poem to form. Not only is the poem separate from the poet, but the poet as a person is separate from the poet on the page. The poem is a medium through which parts of the poet’s personality will appear or be exaggerated while other parts will be hidden. The poet on the page is a composite of these choices.

The emotions of the poet and the events of the poet’s life are not copied onto the page. The poem forms instead when the poet aims “to use ordinary [emotions] and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all” (41). The poet’s emotions and experiences are materials that evolve into a poem through, he says, “passive attending upon the event” (42). Eliot concludes Part 2 by writing,

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things (42).

Part 3

Part 3 is only one paragraph. It states that the essay is meant as a practical guide for anyone interested in poetry. Only a rare poem accomplishes these poetic ideals, a poem whose emotion emerges from the poem itself and not from the “history of the poet” (42). He concludes by bringing the reader back to where he began: For the depersonalization of poetry to occur, the poet must experience not just the present moment but the past as well.