Tradition and Individual

 The essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent is an attack on Certain critical views in Romanticism, especially focusing upon the idea that a poem is primarily an expression of the personality of the poet. Elliot argues that a great poem always asserts and that the poet must develop a sense of the pastness of the past.

1] How would you like to explain Eliot,s concept of Tradition? Do you agree with it?   

    Eliot's concept of tradition. Eliot takes the tradition in a positive way as well as in a larger sense. He also points out that following the tradition is not only slavish imitation. The countries and nations try to preserve their tradition as heritage which is an essential part of their culture and is also handed down from generation to generation. Here one should not merely imitate the tradition but one has to add something new or creative to it and must write with the history in his bones. Tradition is not inherited but it must be acquired with great labor. So we can say that he put emphasis on mingling the past and present with a historical sense.

2) What do you understand in a Historical Sense? 

 Historical sense is the sense of the timeless and the temporal, as well as of the timeless and the temporal together. A writer, who has much sense of tradition, is fully conscious of his own generation, of his place in the present, but he is also actually conscious of his relationship with the writers of the past.

          If we know about figures and facts of history we can understand the time in which people are living and their ways of living, we can compare literary things which are changed, which is better, which is not, many things we can develop with historical sense.

There is a quote from his essay on the historical sense-

"The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence"

          It gives a sense of writing timeless and temporal to the writer. Timelessness is the sense that a work of art doesn't have its past and present. Temporal means it still exists or is present in modern times.

3) What is the relationship between “tradition” and “individual talent,” according to the poet T. S. Eliot?

         Here the tradition is a matter of much wider significance. The title words of the essay "tradition" and "individual talent" have an interconnection. New writers are not merely imitating the tradition but by their own individual talent, they add something new and creative to already existing history or tradition. They give a new charm and beauty to the tradition.

        In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot advocates for the separation of art from the artist and argues that tradition has less to do with imitation and more to do with understanding and expanding upon the intellectual and literary context in which one is writing. Some of the main points in T.S. Eliot's essay are tradition, isolation, knowledge, and catalyst.