T S Eliot's idea of individual talent in relation to tradition in his Tradition and Individual Talent

Thomas Stearns Eliot, being a classicist, shows, both in his literary criticism and creation, an anti-romantic tendency against individualism and subjectivism. He regards poetry as the expression of the personality of the poet and gave emphasis on inspiration and intuition . Eliot’s idea is also different from the neo-classicists who believed that the writer must follow the rules of the ancients and the poetry must be didactic. According to Eliot, an individual talent can not be expressed without some connection with tradition. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ holds his idea of individual talent and tradition.

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At first, Eliot brings out the general ‘tendency to insist’ on finding out the individual talent of a poet--

“We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from   his   predecessors,   especially   his   immediate predecessors: we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.”

But Eliot’s view is that if we ‘without prejudice,’ approach to a poet’s work of not only “the impressionable period of full maturity”, we will find that the individual talent is influenced by tradition. He assured 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 .”

However, he also tells that this ‘tradition’ does not mean “following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its success.” “It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”

Tradition involves the ‘historical sense’ which again involves ‘a
perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of it’s presence. That is, a creative artist, though he lives in a particular age or social environment, does not work merely with his own generation in view, but acts with a conviction in general. However, Eliot accepts that “novelty is better than repetition”.

As  his ‘principle  of  aesthetic,’ Eliot  says  that  no individual talent has his complete ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ alone. “His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists”, in contrast and comparison.

According to Eliot, there is a ‘conformity’ between the new works of an individual talent and the old works of tradition. The new work of art modifies the ‘ideal order’ of the existing works which was a complete order before the arrival of the new one. “The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” Thus, the relation, proportion, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted after each of the work of art of an individual talent.

There must be a standard to judge an individual talent. Eliot says that an individual talent “must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past,” “not amputated by them”. This judgment is not for declaring any of them good or bad, bur with this, they are measured by each other. However, “we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in: but its fitting in is a test of its value-a-in”.

To speak farther about the duty of the individual talent in connection with his relation with the past, Eliot says,

“he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he from himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period”.

In order to know the tradition, he must judge critically what are the main trends and what are not. He must also be conscious of the fact that “art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same”. He must be aware of the changing mind which is a development which abandons nothing ‘enroute’. [“But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past
in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness itself cannot show.”]

The conscious or (unconscious?) cultivation of the sense of the past or tradition which sharpens the sensibility is very important for an individual talent in the process of his poetic creation. Eliot says,

“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.”

The progress of an artist or individual talent is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. That is, an individual talent must surrender himself totally to the creative work. Eliot has explained his idea of the ‘depersonalization’ with a suggestive scientific analogy of introducing finely filiated platinum into oxygen and sulphur di oxide. When these two gases are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulfurous acid. This combination happens only when the platinum is present. Yet there is found no trace of platinum in the newly formed acid. Eliot here compares the mind of the poet to the shred of platinum which, being a catalyst, remains unaffected, inert, neutral and unchanged even after sacrificing itself to the gases. Eliot says that the mind of the poet or
individual talent “may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself.” But the more perfect the artist is the more completely separate the mind will be. Consequently, “the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are it’s material”.

Eliot opposes Wordsworth’s theory, ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. He says,

“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones [and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotion at all. And emotion which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.”]

Eliot’s belief is that the main concern of the poet is not the expression of personality. He says that “the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”

From the above discussion, we see that in Eliot’s theory of individual talent, tradition has a great part. Tradition helps the individual talent produce good poetry. Both of them are closely inter-related and inter-dependent. Eliot’s idea of tradition and individual talent cannot be without criticism as well. Sean Lucy admits the necessity of tradition for individual talent, but he opines that a conscious cultivation of the sense of tradition is not necessary for the individual writer in all epochs. He thinks that Eliot might have been impelled to adopt such an attitude by the ‘danger of literary anarchy’ which was present in the extreme individualism of the ‘spirit of revolt’ which infected so much of European art and thought during the 1920s and part of 1930s.