Examine T.S Eliot's theory of 'Tradition' and "the Individual Talent' ?

T.S. Eliot belongs to the tradition of Dryden, John, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold in
being the poet and the critic at the same time. He was greatly interested in literature and
tried to bring criticism and creation in closer contact. He strongly believed that criticism
and creation were complementary activities and therefore a good poet could only be a
good critic. He exercised a very wide and deep influence on the literary criticism in the
present century. He has rendered a great service to literature by reforming taste and by
revitalising literature. The most distinguishing quality of Eliot's criticism is its sincerity and
freedom from any preconceived standards of judgment. He places before the artist as
well as the critic the goal of attaining nothing less than excellence and insists that the
critic in order to see the object as it is must take unremitting pains and discipline his
powers. He also points out that mature art is created only in a society which is prepared
to receive and grasp fresh ideas. He knows that though perfection is rather unattainable,
he would, in poetry and criticism, be content with nothing less than that. In literature he
was a classicist and supported order and discipline, authority and tradition, and
organization and pattern.

There was an anti-romantic tendency in the early parts of the twentieth century, which
found its most definite pronouncement in the works of Eliot. He strongly supported the
reaction against subjectivism and individualism. In this he was greatly influenced by
Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. T.E. Hulme, who rejected the view of man's
essential goodness, and asserted that for really great creative work a belief in the
Original Sin was indispensable, also influenced Eliot in his critical views. Like other
classicists, Eliot is of opinion that the writer must have faith in some system of writing
and that a work of art must conform to the past tradition. But there is a significant
difference between him and the neo-classical critics of the eighteenth century. The neo-
classicists believed that the writer must follow rules of the ancients and that poetry must
be didactic. Eliot's idea of "conformity to tradition" is totally different from this. A work of
art must conform to tradition is such a way that it alters the tradition as much as it is
directed by it. According to Eliot's conception tradition and the individual talent go
together.

The theme of tradition is central both to Eliot's criticism and to his creative work. His
instance on the value and importance of tradition for the individual talent is essentially
anti-romantic. The romantic theory, which regarded poetry as the expression of the
personality of the poet, laid emphasis on inspection and intuition. The romantics believed
that the poet should follow his "inner voice" in writing poetry. But inspiration is fitful and
unreliable; it is only a matter of chance and accident. In the hands of lesser poets the
unrestrained and unlimited freedom is likely to degenerate into chaos and confusion.
The romantic theory did not attach any significance to tradition. On the contrary, freedom
from all tradition was considered to be very essential for artistic creation.

Eliot's views on the comparative importance of tradition and the individual talent in
literature have been explicitly expressed in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent.
At the very beginning of this essay Eliot deplores the fact that in English literary criticism
'tradition' is used as a phrase of censure. He says that the word 'tradition' has not been
given correct interpretation and due weight and importance so far. In English literature
and criticism we rarely come across passages which illustrate the right use and meaning
of the term 'tradition'. From time to time the English critics have been applying the word
in expressing their grief for its absence. They do not make a reference to "the tradition"
or to "a tradition"; at most they use the adjective in saying that the poetry is so and so
'traditional' or even 'too traditional'. The word appears rarely and when it does appear, it
is used as a phrase of censure. Rarely used in a commendatory sense, the term
'tradition' is at best applied by English critics for vaguely approving a work of art as
traditional as preserving in it some antique, out-of date, literary curiosities of old times,
which are yet pleasing to the present age. Thus in English criticism, according to Eliot
there is a deplorable lack of that critical insight which views a particular literary work or
writer in the context of a wider literary tradition. The English literary critic does not give
due weight and importance to tradition in evaluating the writers of the past and in
appreciating the poets of the present. He uses 'tradition' in a derogatory sense.

Eliot says that the Englishmen have a tendency to insist, when they praise a poet, upon
those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects of
his work they try to find out what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of that man.
They try to find out the difference of the poet with his contemporaries and predecessors
especially with his immediate predecessors, they try to find out something that can be
separated in order to be enjoyed. But if we study the poet without bias or prejudice, we
shall often find 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 forcefully and
vigorously. We find the dead poets in the present poets not in their impressionable
period of adolescence, but in the period of their full maturity. Thus, Eliot believes,
tradition and the individual talent go together.

In After Strange Gods Eliot defines tradition in the following manner: "Tradition is not
solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have
come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition." What I mean
by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most
significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent
the blood kinship of "the same people living in the same place". It is also " a way of
feeling and acting which characterises a group throughout generations, and it must
largely be unconscious ". Tradition he says, is " the means by which the vitality of past
enriches the life of the present ".

In all his work Eliot is mainly concerned with the problem of order as it arises in various
ways. In Tradition and the Individual Talent he takes up this problem of order by
enquiring whether the works of literature coming down to us through the entire Western
tradition from a recognisable and definable order; and the existence of which is to affect
the creative work of the present. Eliot stresses the presentness of the past order, and
strives to show that the needs of the present age can only be expressed in the
perspective of the past tradition. The present also has relevance to the past, because
the traditional order is modified by the production of a truly original work of literature in
the present. Eliot considers tradition as a part of the living culture of the past and
working in the order of the present. Tradition is a dynamic force; it does not mean
standing still. As he says in Burnt Norton:

And do not call it fixityWhere past and futureare gathered.Neither

movement fromnor towards.Neither ascent nor decline.
Again,
referring to the unity of time he says:Time present and time Past Are both perhaps
present in time future And time future contained in time past.(Burnt Norton)

Tradition does not mean the handing down, or following the ways of the ancients blindly.
It cannot be inherited. It can only be obtained with great labour . It involves a historical
sense which enables a poet to perceive not only the pastness of the past but also its
presentness . A creative artist, though he lives in a particular milieu, does not work
merely with his own generation in view. He does not take his own age, or the literature of
that period only as a separate identity, but acts with a conviction that in general the
whole literature of Europe from the classical age of the Greeks onwards, and in
particular the literature of his own country, is to be taken as a harmonious whole. His
own creative efforts are not apart from it but a part of it. Eliot firmly believes that no poet
or artist has his full meaning and significance alone. His importance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his kinship with the poets and artists of the past generation. The
necessity for the individual talent to conform to tradition is not one sided; what happens
when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the
work of art which preceded it. In Tradition and the Individual Talent Eliot says: "The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervision of
novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are re-adjusted; and this is
conformity between the old and the new". This means that " the past should be altered
by the present as much as the present is directed by the past".

The conscious or unconscious cultivation of the sense of tradition is very important both
for the poet and the critic. The poet, according to Eliot, must consciously try to make his
work form a part of a larger and more important unit than itself, namely the whole
literature of Europe to which it belongs. In Tradition and the Individual Talent he 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". He believes that it is the awareness of tradition that sharpens the sensibility,
which has a vital part to play in the process of poetic creation.

The other thing, which is to be discussed in this connection is Eliot's impersonal theory
of poetry which has a strong bearing on his concept of tradition. Eliot firmly believes that
poetry is not the expression of the personality of the poet. He elucidates his impersonal
theory by examining, first " the relation of the poet to the past " and secondly "the
relation of the poem to its author". The past, Eliot says, is never dead: it lives in the
present. " 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 his alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison,
among the dead". Eliot insists on the importance of the relation of the poem to other
poems by other authors and suggests the conception of poetry as a living whole of all
the poetry that has ever been written.

The artistic process, according to Eliot, is a process of depersonalization, the artist's

continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more
valuable. He must surrender himself totally to the creative work. "The progress of an
artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality". He also points out
the relation of the poem to its author; the poem, according to him, has no relation to the
poet. The difference between the mind of a mature poet and that of an immature one is
that the mind of a mature poet is " a more finely perfected medium in which special or
very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combination ".

It is in this depersonalisation that art may be said to approach to the condition of

science. Eliot explains this process of depersonalisation and its relation to the sense of
tradition by comparing it with the chemical process - the action which takes place when a
bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur
dioxide. The analogy is that of the catalyst. He says: " When the two gases previously
mentioned (oxygen and sulphur dioxide) are mixed in the presence of a filament of
platinum, they form sulphurous acid. The combination takes place only if the platinum is
present; nevertheless, the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the
platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The
mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the
experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material ".

The elements of the experience of the poet are of two kinds-emotions and feelings. They
are elements which, entering the presence of the poet's mind and acting as a catalyst,
go to the making of a work of art. The poet's mind is 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. Eliot believes that the
greatness of a poem does not depend on the greatness or the intensity of the emotions
but on the intensity of the artistic process; the pressure under which the fusion takes
place. He strongly believes that "the difference between art and the event is always
absolute. Eliot illustrates his view by a few examples, among which one is of Keats's
Ode to a Nightingale, which contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular
to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly perhaps because of its
attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

Eliot believes 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 (the
mind), which in only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences
which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which
became important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the
personality". Again, there is no need for the poet to try to express new human emotions
in poetry. The business of the poet, Eliot says, is not to find new emotions, but use the
ordinary ones and, in working them up in poetry, to express feelings which are not in
actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn
as will as those familiar to him. The poetic process is a process of concentration, and not
of recollection (as Wordsworth thought) of a very great number of experiences. Eliot's
final definition of poetry is: "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".
In the last section of the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent Eliot says that the
poet's sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things. He
tried to divert the interest from the poet to the poetry, for it would conduce to a juster
estimation of actual poetry, good or bad. He says that " very few know when there is an
expression of significant emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of
the poet. 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 ". Thus, Eliot concludes, a constant and continual awareness of tradition is very
necessary for the poet. Tradition greatly helps the individual talent to produce good
poetry. Both are inextricably inter linked and inter dependent.