TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT

T S ELIOT
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The
Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was
written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), who had been living in
London for the last few years, and who had published his first volume of poems, Prufrock
and Other Observations, in 1917.

Summary

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in
helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing –
indeed, of much modernism – that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even
more directly and more pointedly than previous poets had.

This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea
of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important
older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries
because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do.

James Joyce looked back to ancient Greek myth (the story of Odysseus) for his novel set in
modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours and poets
of the Middle Ages. H. D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek references and ideas. As
Eliot puts it, ‘Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so
much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.’

He goes on to argue that a modern poet should write with the literature of all previous ages
‘in his bones’, as though Homer and Shakespeare were his (or her) contemporaries: ‘This
historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless
and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time
what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.’

In short, knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers both part of that
tradition and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own poetry, for instance, is
simultaneously in the tradition of Homer and Dante and the work of a modern poet, and it is
because of his debt to Homer and Dante that he is both modern and traditional.

If this sounds like a paradox, consider how Shakespeare is often considered both a ‘timeless’
poet (‘Not of an age, but for all time’, as his friend Ben Jonson said) whose work is
constantly being reinvented, but is also understood in the context of Elizabethan and
Jacobean social and political attitudes.

Similarly, in using Dante in his own poetry, Eliot at once makes Dante ‘modern’ and
contemporary, and himself – by association – part of the wider poetic tradition.

Eliot’s essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. That is, the poet’s
personality does not matter, as it’s the poetry that s/he produces that is important. Famously,
he observes: ‘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.’

This is more or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement (in the ‘Preface’
to Lyrical Ballads in 1800) that ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
Once again, Eliot sets himself apart from such a Romantic notion of poetry. This is in
keeping with his earlier argument about the importance of tradition: the poet’s personality
does not matter, only how their work responds to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.

Analysis

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is a major work in Eliot’s prose writings, and perhaps
his most famous essay. The argument he puts forward (summarised above) is perhaps
surprising given modernism’s association with radical departures from artistic norms and
traditions. As a modernist, Eliot might be expected to reject the great ‘canon’ or tradition of
poetry that had gone before him.

But no: poetry, including Eliot’s own and that of his fellow modernists, derives its
distinctiveness – and even its newness – from engaging with what earlier poets have done.
Indeed, it is by drawing on the work of earlier writers and, as it were, standing on the
shoulders of literary giants that a new poet asserts their own voice among the crowd.

And this is why Eliot’s other key argument in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is
relevant. The poet should not seek to be ‘original’ by disregarding tradition altogether, but by
looking for minimal ways in which they can alter what has gone before and create something
slightly different and fresh. And the poet should forget about expressing an individual
‘personality’ for the same reason: a poet should be plugged into the common shared tradition
of poetry rather than thinking they are working alone.

Eliot’s example of Homer is pertinent here: we know nothing of the poet who wrote The
Odyssey for certain, but we don’t need to. The Odyssey itself is what matters, not the man (or
men – or woman!) who wrote it. Poetry should be timeless and universal, transcending the
circumstances out of which it grew, and transcending the poet’s own generation and lifetime.
(Eliot’s argument raises an interesting question: can self-evidently personal poetry – e.g. by
confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, or Romantics like Wordsworth – not also be timeless
and universal? Evidently it can, as these poets’ works have outlived the poets who wrote
them.)

But is this too simplistic an analysis of Eliot’s argument? His criticism of the idea of poetic
personality sounds anti-romantic: a move away from the Romantic idea that, to quote
Wordsworth again, ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. But as the
critic C. K. Stead argues in his brilliant The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (Continuum
Impacts) , Eliot’s talk of escape from personality is not a call to escape from the self but a call
to escape further into the self.

For Eliot, the more mature the poet, the more his mind is able to synthesise various influences
and emotions to produce something varied and complex. These influences and emotions are
worked into great poetry by the self: it is inaccurate to view Eliot’s essay as a critical
rejection of ‘self’ altogether. If anything, he is arguing that great poetry is forged in
the deeper self, rather than the surface ‘personality’ of the poet.

We might also bear in mind that Eliot knew that great poets often incorporated part of
themselves into their work – he would do it himself, so that, although it would be naive to
read The Waste Land as being ‘about’ Eliot’s failed marriage to his first wife, we can
nevertheless see aspects of his marriage informing the poem.

And in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Eliot would acknowledge that the poet of
poets, Shakespeare, must have done such a thing: the Bard ‘was occupied with the struggle –
which alone constitutes life for a poet – to transmute his personal and private agonies into
something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal’.

For Eliot, great poets turn personal experience into impersonal poetry, but this nevertheless
means that their poetry often stems from the personal. It is the poet’s task to transmute
personal feelings into something more universal. Eliot is rather vague about how a poet is to
do this – leaving others to ponder it at length.

Lyndall Gordon observes a curious paradox regarding Eliot in this regard, in her biography of
Eliot, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot. She points out that although Eliot claimed that
drama was less personal than poetry, the cover of drama actually gave Eliot the freedom to
expose his private crises. We might extend such an idea to the earlier work, too, and see a
character like J. Alfred Prufrock, not as a stand-in for young Eliot per se, but as a Laforgue-
inspired mask which Eliot could adopt in order to transmute private attitudes or emotions into
something more universal. In other words, Eliot knew that the best way he could plumb the
depths of his own emotions and experiences was by speaking as someone else. As Oscar
Wilde said, ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give a man a mask and he
will tell you the truth.’

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential
poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
(1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the
‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that
all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems
we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse
line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more
‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Born in St
Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his
postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London.
He met a fellow American expatriate, Ezra Pound, who had already published several
volumes of poetry, and Pound helped to get Eliot’s work into print. Although his first
collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), sold modestly (its print run of 500
copies would take five years to sell out), the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, with its
picture of a post-war Europe in spiritual crisis, established him as one of the most important
literary figures of his day.

He never returned to America (except to visit as a lecturer), but became an official British
citizen in 1927, the same year he was confirmed into the Church of England. His last major
achievement as a poet was Four Quartets (1935-42), which reflect his turn to Anglicanism.
In his later years he attempted to reform English verse drama with plays like Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He died in London in 1965.

******
T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent was first published as an anonymous
piece in The Egoist, a London literary review, in September and December 1919 and
subsequently included by Eliot in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, published
in 1920. That it continues to exert a genuine influence on thought regarding the
interrelationship among literary classics, individual artists, and the nature of the creative
imagination, is a comment on its value. In any case, Eliot was able to let loose in this
comparatively short essay—it runs to little more than 3,000 words—packing virtually every
sentence with pronouncements that, in any other context of presentation, might have required
far more elaboration and persuasive defense.

SYNOPSIS
Despite these genuine virtues and the essay’s deserved renown, Tradition and the Individual
Talent is rather loosely, perhaps even haphazardly constructed and is worthy of consideration
far more for the power of its suggestiveness than for the precision of its organization. In
essence, the essay proposes a series of key concepts that would subsequently become
germane, for one thing, to readings of Eliot’s own poetry and that would also eventually
become the root if not the immediate source for major critical approaches with regard to
modernism in general and the methodology of New Criticism in particular. In addition to
exploring the question of the relationship between the tradition—that is, works already
preexisting in a national or even multicultural body of literature—and any one poet in
particular (that is, “the individual talent”), Eliot also delves into and, so, makes
pronouncements on the relationship between the poet as a person and the poet as a creative
intellect.
He comments as well, finally, on how much or how greatly a work of literature ought to be
regarded as giving expression to the personality of the poet, giving birth to the impersonal
theory of poetry. Coming relatively hard upon the poetry of the English romantics, the
longest-lived of whom, William Wordsworth, had been dead nearly 70 years by 1919 and
whose subjective, expressive approach toward the writing of poetry still wielded excessive
sway over both the composition and the reading of poetry, Eliot’s efforts to found in principle
in what would later become known as the impersonal school of poetry can hardly be scanted
or overlooked. While his essay may not have initiated the powerful reaction to romanticism
that is now thought of as literary modernism, the essay certainly gave that movement voice
and a clear agenda.

In keeping with an analytical approach, Eliot structures his central argument around various
issues of separation. Specifically, and as will be examined in more detail shortly, there is the
matter of the quality and degree of the separation that may or may not exist between the body
of past literature, or the created tradition, and the individual living poet creating within the
tradition’s most current or ongoing moment. Eliot also considers the degree and quality of
separation necessary between that living poet as a fully rounded person (what he calls—
perhaps a bit too colorfully—the “man who suffers”) and those aspects of that individual’s
intellectual choices and other selective processes that result in the making of an actual work
of literature (what he calls the “mind which creates”). Finally, Eliot takes into consideration
the degree and quality of separation that is necessary between, on the one hand, the artist as
an individual whose utterances may be thought to express a personality and, on the other
hand, the semblance of personality that is, or can be, expressed in the work without any need
for reference to the author’s own personality.

As may be apparent, there is some considerable overlap and confusion of terms here, as well
as some overlap between matters that involve the act of writing—actions that involve the
creation of a text—and the act of reading, which, because it is a process that involves the
reception of a preexisting text, is a quite different approach. Nevertheless, the essay’s central
premise, as well as its continuing critical value, is, in essence, Eliot’s argument that the
creative process is an impersonal process, despite the tendencies of many readers to persist in
identifying the speaker of a poem with the poet. Keeping this central premise in mind ought
to demystify many of Eliot’s pronouncements on similar subjects.

The Living Talent and the Tradition

Eliot begins his presentation by directly addressing the essay’s ostensible topic, the
relationship between tradition and the individual talent. What may seem to be the most
obvious point in his opening argument is certainly the most salient, that the tradition is at any
one time a completed whole that comprises all of the preceding creative endeavor out of
which the individual author creates a new work. Tradition, then, is a continuum, and this
point is one of the essay’s more daring stances. It may seem by now to stand to reason that
the living practitioners of any one discipline add to and, so, shape and alter the accumulated
store of their predecessors’ efforts—that, in other words, these past efforts live in a present
that is continuously transforming itself into new efforts that then themselves become the
efforts of the past, and so on.

Though such a position may sound reasonable and justified, Eliot’s taking that position, as his
feeling the need to defend it to his readers should readily attest, flew in the face of the
conventional wisdom to that time and that had been in place virtually from the beginnings of
the European Renaissance. According to that wisdom, the ancients, meaning the classical
writers of Greece and of Rome—Homer, Sophocles, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, and others—were
giants who towered over their puny modern descendants, who consequently characterized
themselves as pygmies.

In that older way of casting the debate, the moderns, although by no means capable of being
better or wiser than their ancient forbears, still had the advantage of being able to build on
and improve such models as those ancients had left behind. Indeed, the term classic, in
addition to connoting excellence in its field, implies a representative prototype within the
particular genre or kind of work— epic, drama, lyric poem, and so forth. To complete the
metaphor, if the ancients were giants and the moderns pygmies, those pygmies could
nevertheless stand on the shoulders of the ancients and, in that way—but that way only—
surpass them.

Eliot comes out firmly against any notion of couching the tradition in terms of a conflict and
competition between the old and the new, the past and the present. In sharp contrast to this
older idea of a combative relationship among long dead and living traditions and long dead
and living artists, Eliot, who shortly before writing the essay now being considered had
visited the underground caverns in southern France where cave drawings that were tens of
thousands of years old had recently been discovered, could talk of a mind of Europe that had
discarded nothing of its virtually timeless creative traditions along the way, as if there were in
fact neither any seam nor any conflict separating the present from the past, the ancients from
the moderns, or one work of art from another. Rather, there was only that constant stream of
statement and restatement, adjusting and altering and coming back upon itself as each new
voice is added to, and adds to, the mix. So, then, Eliot asserts that poets cannot write after the
age of 25 unless they have developed what he calls the historical sense, that being a sense not
of the pastness of the past, as he puts it, but of its presence.

It is at this point that Eliot’s argument takes a sudden, or at least unanticipated, turn by
suggesting that the more perfect they are, the more artists express not their own personal lives
and points of view so much as contribute to that living stream of creative endeavor. This
abrupt turn makes much logical sense, however. Having just redefined the nature of tradition,
one half of his title, Eliot is now obligated to define what he means by the individual talent,
the other half.

The Impersonality of Creation

To explain his position on this score, Eliot introduces a simile drawn from chemistry, in
which the mind of the individual artist is likened to a catalyst. As such, it allows disparate
experiences to combine in new patterns that then form the work of art, like the chemical
compound that results from the introduction of the necessary catalyst into the presence of the
elements to be combined. While the catalyst initiates and enables the chemical reaction, or
poetic process, to take place, resulting in the new compound or poetic composition, the
catalyst itself is not otherwise affected and certainly, for all intents and purposes, is
unchanged by the event. In other words, poetic composition is an impersonal process,
engaging the poet’s creative and critical faculties but not necessarily any more of his or her
personal life than, say, the chemical reactions that take place in the laboratory personally
involve the chemist.

A romantic notion persists to this day among readers that poets pour forth their souls in their
poetry. Eliot says not that that is not the case, but that it ought not to be the case. As cold and
dispassionate as this may sound as a description of the creative process, Eliot is responding to
nearly a century of that same process’s having been regarded as something akin to Plato’s
divine madness. The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is how William Wordsworth
had defined the poetic impulse more than a century before in his preface to Lyrical
Ballads (albeit with some further qualifications that Eliot later will cite). Wordsworth’s idea
seems clear: Poetry is an expression of personal emotions that can no longer be contained by
the poet unless he expresses them in his poetry.

Eliot is trying to counter that claim by proposing that the creative act is as calculating and
conscious an endeavor as any other constructive action and therefore is one that can be
regarded wholly in terms of itself and of the traditions out of which it emerges, rather than in
terms of the individual poet’s life and experiences. So, then, Eliot can further claim,
legitimately for his purposes—which are to separate the poet from the poem and thus give
primacy not to personality but to poetry—that poetry is not an expression of but an escape
from personality, not a turning loose of but an escape from emotion (emphasizing a bit too
coyly in his closing remark that only those who know what personality and emotions are
would understand why one would want to escape from them).

As Hamlet says, however, that idea would be “scanned,” or scrutinized, for it must seem that,
if the reader takes Eliot at his word, then Eliot is suggesting that the best poetry is escapist
because personality and emotions are powerfully dangerous things whose expression ought to
be avoided at all costs. In actuality, that is not Eliot’s point. Eliot is trying to propose an
entirely different model of what poetry ought to concern itself with, as well as of how people
ought to concern themselves with poetry. It is in his attack on the commonplace way of
thinking of poetry as a personally expressive and emotive art that he is trying to propose, not
that poetry is therefore escapist but that a poem is experience that has been objectified by
structuring processes and the conscious selection of language and therefore is, as a statement,
self-referential, nothing more and nothing less.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY
Debates over whether artists in any medium of expression produce out of and, so, comment
only on their own personal experiences or whether they can instead express universal and
thus objectified human situations are as old at least as Plato’s Republic and his dialogue “Ion”
from the fifth century B.C. In the Republic, Plato, through his mouthpiece Socrates, famously
banished virtually all the poets from the ideal community because, in his view, they do not
speak universal truths openly and sincerely. Rather, they either conceal themselves behind
masks, that is, their characters, or else speak only for themselves. In the “Ion,” Plato similarly
argues that the poet is merely a medium for divine truths that have their origin elsewhere, so
poetry is nothing more than a species of divine madness. Either way, Plato treated the poet,
and poetry, as a special case, difficult either to categorize or to discuss. Whatever else he may
have done as a result, Plato established a long-running tradition that the relationship between
the poet and the poem is a knotty one.

The fact is, however, that Eliot composed the essay in question while he was still relatively
young—just turned 30—and not only was he at the time also a relative unknown himself, but
the essay was published anonymously. It is more likely, then, that it is the forcefulness,
confidence, and clarity with which the central ideas of the essay are expressed that account
for its enduring celebrity. It has been argued that the very anonymity that Eliot was able to
maintain as he penned his thoughts and opinions on such a weighty and controversial literary
question as the source of original poetic impulses might account for that tone of sublime
authority in which Eliot conducts his presentation. One is inclined to share ideas more
expansively and without fear of easy contradiction or challenge when the source of those
ideas can be anyone and, so, becomes that powerfully impersonal force, the expert.

This does not take away from Eliot’s ultimate achievement as a budding literary critic. To
add, as Eliot does in his essay, even another sentence or paragraph, let alone another page, to
the ongoing debate regarding the relationship among the poet, the culture, and the poem is
quite an accomplishment, and Eliot might never have arrived at such an accomplishment on
the basis of the considerable reputation as a man of letters that he had achieved by his early
middle age. Rather, it is the strength of the idea itself that carries the day. Eliot makes the
poetry the important thing.

Another way to put it is to say that poetry is an abstract construct rather than any sort of
personal statement and that its “meaning” then can be found in how it is put together rather
than in what it is necessarily “saying.” If readers imagine that a poem is nothing more than
personal expression, for instance, then poetry wins or loses its authority on the basis not of its
own qualities but of matters entirely exterior and thus extraneous to the poem. The poet’s
beliefs and attitudes and habits and foibles, not as readers know them but as they become
known by the hearsay of gossip and rumor, scholarship and biographies, become more
important than his or her poetry. That is a self-evidently absurdist posture. Lost in the process
of adhering to the notion that a poem is nothing more or less than prettified self-expression is,
of all things, the poem as a thing all its own, the way a flower or stone or bird is all its own
thing and not what would be made of it by making it something other than itself.

Such a way of perceiving Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry” will lead readers right back to
the importance that he places on regarding tradition as a living cultural force in the opening
pages of the essay. There Eliot argues that the intensity of poetry is dependent not on the
intensity of the poetic process but on the “intensity of the artistic process.” The poet has not a
personality to express but a “particular medium” to work with and through, whereby
“impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”

His points are well taken if they can be seen to be emphasizing artistic expression on its own
terms, formed by and adding to generations of tradition, rather than as a mere extension of the
personality and emotions of the particular poet. Then the artistic product can be viewed,
regarded, appreciated, and even criticized not in terms of what it appears to tell readers of the
peculiarly limited life and times of its author, as if literature were only second-rate or at least
far less rigorous history or social science, but in terms of the universal abstractions it reveals
in the concrete terms of language and what Eliot will later call art emotions. Those, he insists,
are not the emotions of any single person, however interesting a personality he or she may
have been, but of common human experience generalized into those poetic contexts and
constructs that form the traditions out of which an endless stream of new individual talents
continue to write.

Eliot further insists that the individual talent writes best when it writes not for the sake of
expressing itself as a personality, but for the sake of constantly shaping that tradition, whether
that individual talent knows of it or not. (Naturally, Eliot would argue that anyone aspiring to
practice an artistic endeavor should know its traditions through and through.) By virtue of the
radical stance that he takes in Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that the
individual talent ought to know what his or her obligations to the tradition are and to know
that one must have absorbed the tradition. It is, as it were, a never-ending circle in which
personal issues have no place, although their rich variety, transmuted by the intensity of
impersonal poetic processes, is indisputably the raw material of art, but only that.