T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

In his "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot writes, in response to Wordsworth and Aristotle, about poetry and art. Eliot begins his argument by talking about tradition. Eliot begins by stating that the word "tradition", with the exception of archaeology, is an unusable word in English writing because of its negative feeling. Eliot continues his argument disussing how people judge each other and states that criticism is inherent to human society and cannot be stopped. Criticism will always happen. Eliot continues by stating that the value of a poet's work is in how different it is from other works. Eliot then goes back to tradition sating that if people did folow tradition they should not follow tradition through repeating what happened but must use reason to detemine what should be done about it. According to Eliot, when looking at the past, poets should look at the past from the present and not from the past. Eliot then goes back to his idea of criticism and states that artists are valued not only by their own works, but instead, they are judged by how they compare with other previous artists. According to Eliot, art is valued by how it differs from other preivous art. The more similar it is to other pieces of art, the less value of it is as art, and the more diverse it is from other pieces of art, then more value it has as art. Eliot continues his argument toward why poets should write about the past form the present, by stating that now in the present we know more than preivous people did, therefore because of that greater knowledge we should look at the past from the present. Eliot ends his first section by stating that the act of poetry is to lose personality. Poetry is not suppose to show the personality of anyone. Eliot begins his sceond section by giving an analogy which states that the mind of a poet is like a catalyst which causes change to everything around it except itself. Eliot finishes his second section by discussing emotions and how the poet's emotions should not dirrectly pass through his poetry but instead the poetry should show a strong sense of emotion that is not personal to the poet. These emotions must express a new emotion without actually creating that new emotion. The final tension that Eliot leave the reader in this section is the tension that poetry is the act of "escaping" emotion and personality not finding it.

In his "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot seems to be looking in much of the opposite dirrection of the romanicism writers (and Aristotle). As Aristotle and Eliot both seem to want to explain what makes good poetry, Aristotle and Eliot both claim that an expression of emotion in poetry is good and also claim that poetry should look toward future events (within the same poetry), but as Aristotle states that poetry should have a future reasoning sense in which it looks toward what could happen, Eliot states that poetry should look to the past in comparision and reason with the past and should bring this reasoning into the present for better understanding. Eliot also opposes Wordsworth, who claims that good poetry is made by good poets who only write their feelings, by stating that good poetry in fact can come from anyone but it must avoid personal emotions and must relieve the reader of "personality and emotion".

After reading "Tradition and the Individual Talent", and also while considering romanicism writers one could ask the question: Why should poetry look to the past and present and no the future? Could it be because the future is uncertain and undefined or does Eliot include include any ideas of the future as present reason because it is a sense of current hope for what may happen?