Essay Club: Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot

"Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it."

Welcome back to Essay Club! It’s been a while. I trust you’re all staying sane and continuing to read great essays. For me it’s been a long couple of months punctuated by stress and tragedy, but also moments of great joy. I hope self-citation isn’t frowned upon here, because the poet Dan Ackerfeld said it best: “Life’s joy and pain are one and same”.

T. S. Eliot.

This month’s essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), was written by one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, Thomas Stearns Eliot. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St Louis, Missouri, but lived in England from his mid-twenties onward. He was a prolific writer, publishing numerous poems, plays, and critical essays in his lifetime, and is best known to modern readers for The Waste Land (1922), a landmark work of Modernist poetry. In addition to his continuing influence on modern poetry, he remains influential in the field of literary criticism through his introduction of important concepts such as the ‘objective correlative’ and the ‘theory of impersonality’ (which we see echoed in another great essay, Barthes’ The Death of the Author).

Tradition and the Individual Talent asks us to consider how new artistic works are influenced by two key factors: the pre-existing literary tradition of an artist’s culture, and the individual personality of the artist. Eliot takes a strong stance on both, and it’s worth reading his arguments in full, so I’d encourage you to take 15 minutes to read the essay first, and then return here to read my review and join the conversation in the comments.

---

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Eliot opens his essay by observing that tradition has become a dirty word. To the average reader, ‘traditional’ means something like ‘old-fashioned’, and when critics praise a writer they almost always do so by extolling the qualities that distinguish him from those writers that came before:

“When we praise a poet, [we focus] upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man.”

Eliot takes a different view. To him, the most interesting and laudable parts of a writer’s work are “those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously”. This is not merely a call for the thoughtless recreation of old works and styles; it involves what Eliot calls the historical sense, a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”. This is a famously vague notion, but I take it to mean something like a familiarity with the major characters, stories, ideas, symbols, literary devices, and moral quandaries that have transfixed one’s ancestors since time immemorial, as well as a sense of their development over time, and of one’s own place in this lineage. For a European-descended writer like Eliot, the historical sense is “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.” What makes a writer capital-T Traditional, then—and I use this word in a positive sense—is a personal immersion within, and elaboration upon, this great Tradition.

Eliot goes on to suggest that this isn’t a matter of personal choice:

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”

An artist is never, and can never be, appreciated in isolation. All artistic works are necessarily influenced by those works that came before, and thus must be interpreted in relation to them (even if only unconsciously). But this relationship is not one-sided—when a new work of art is created, it forever alters our interpretation of the works that preceded it. The Tradition itself is changed, and “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted”.

This is a fairly abstract idea, so to understand what Eliot means here, consider the place of The Beatles in relation to popular music in 2024. In their day, The Beatles were viewed as musically, aesthetically, and culturally radical. Their influence continues to be felt in popular music today, and they continue to be discussed and enjoyed by millions worldwide. But can they still be called ‘radical’? We can certainly acknowledge the impact that The Beatles had on Western culture in the 1960s, but by today’s standards they seem quaint. In ‘loudness’ they’ve been eclipsed by heavy metal; in vulgarity they’ve been eclipsed by hip hop. These new musical developments have changed the way that we interpret The Beatles’ music, so even though people will continue to enjoy and appreciate it, no band writing similar music today would ever be listened to in the same way (indeed, they’d be lucky to fill a local pub).

The Traditional artist needs to understand all of this. He needs to maintain an awareness of the Tradition while resisting the temptation to create work that is merely derivative of it. Knowing that his art will be compared with earlier works, he must strike a careful balance between a total conformity with, and rejection of, the Tradition. This is an incredibly difficult task, and it’s no surprise that so many contemporary artists instead choose to ignore (or even attack) their literary heritage. To his credit, Eliot faced this challenge head on—The Waste Land is a notoriously difficult poem on first read, not least because it is so saturated with allusions to earlier works, but these allusions give it a depth and quality that rewards those who have immersed themselves in great literature.

To be clear, Eliot is not suggesting that a writer must have read every canonical work before beginning his first novel. He tells us:

“I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon…

“Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.”

This brings us to the second part of the essay. In part II, Eliot argues that great poetry comes not from the individual personality or experiences of the poet, but from the unique combination of ordinary emotions and feelings, refined within the mind of the poet. This is Eliot’s ‘theory of impersonality’—the poet’s mind, Eliot tells us, acts as a “receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” It is not the intensity of the various components of a poem (the emotions, phrases, images, etc.), but the “intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place” that makes a poem great.

This point hearkens back to the beginning of the essay—“When we praise a poet, [we focus] upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else… we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man…”—and, once again, Eliot emphatically rejects this approach. The purpose of poetry is not to “seek for new human emotions to express”, but to “use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.” Eliot believes that this process is often, perhaps even largely, unconscious; great poetry is thus the result of a gradual concentration of knowledge, feelings, images, and other elements drawn from the works of one’s culture, one’s history, one’s Tradition, and then only to a very minor extent one’s own experiences. In short:

“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

T. S. Eliot’s advice to the aspiring poet, then, is this: Immerse yourself in your Tradition. Read the great works of your culture’s literary canon, learn the teachings of your spiritual masters, know the myths of your nation and people, and allow all of it to work its magic within you. Write less about your own experiences, and more about the experiences of humanity. Finally, recognise that great art comes not from the expression of personal emotion, but from the continual development of your ‘historical sense’.

To conclude:

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

---

Questions and Housekeeping

That’s all for this month! Honestly, it feels good to be doing this again. I’ve been reading more fiction recently (Dostoevsky, Arthurian romances), and while I’ve enjoyed this immensely, there’s no better way to tackle big ideas than with an essay.

Here are a few questions to discuss in the comments below:

• What did you think of Eliot’s essay, overall?

• Do you agree with Eliot’s impersonal approach to poetry? If you’ve read a lot of poetry yourself, how does his poetic work compare to more ‘personal’ poets for you?

• How do you think the conscious rejection of Tradition has affected contemporary art, literature, etc.? Is there any value in taking an anti-Traditional approach to art?

Thanks, as always, for your support of Essay Club. If you enjoyed this, please share it around, leave a like, share your thoughts in the comments(!), and subscribe if you haven’t already done so.

The next instalment of Essay Club will be on the 12th of October. It’s been almost a year since I first started Essay Club with George Orwell’s Why I Write, so I think it’s time to revisit the famous Brit. Let’s discuss his (arguably) most well known essay, Politics and the English Language (1946).

Until then, see you in the comments!