👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻The ESL ACADEMY...BY SIRRANA


👉🏻👉🏻Main Concepts of 'Tradition and Individual Talent'


As a critic T. S. Eliot was very practical. He called himself “a classicist in literature”. According to Eliot, a critic must obey the objective standards to analyze any work. He thought criticism as a science. Eliot’s criticism became revolutionary at that time. 2oth century got ‘metaphysical revival’ because of Eliot. He first recognized or accepted the uniqueness of ‘metaphysical poets’ of 17th century. Eliot came with new ideas in criticism’s world in19th century. Eliot believed that when the old and new will become readjusted, it will be the end of criticism. He says:
“From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature and set the poets and the poems in a new order.”
Eliot demands, from any critic, ability for judgment and powerful liberty of mind to identify and to interpret. Eliot planned numerous critical concepts that gained wide currency and had a broad influence on criticism. ‘Objective co-relative’, ‘Dissociation of sensibility’, ‘Unification of sensibility’, ‘Theory of Depersonalization’ are few of Eliot’s theories, which becomes ‘cliché’ now. He emphasizes on ‘a highly developed sense of fact’. He gave new direction and new tools of criticism. George Watson writes about Eliot:
“Eliot made English criticism look different, but not in a simple sense. He offered it a new range of rhetorical possibilities, confirmed it in its increasing contempt for historical process, and yet reshaped its notion of period by a handful of brilliant institutions.”


·       Main Concepts of the Essay:

      The essay “Tradition and Individual Talent” was first published in “The Egoist”. “The Egoist” was a literary magazine, which is considered today as “England’s Most Important Modernist Periodical”. This essay was later published in “The Sacred Wood”, which is Eliot’s first book of criticism.
   
 This essay is divided into three parts:
1.     The concept of tradition
2.     The theory of impersonal poetry
3.     The conclusion with a gist that “the poet’s sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complimentary things.”

👉🏻Now I am explaining the main concepts of the essay...
👉🏻🌹1.     The Concept of Tradition:

In first pat Eliot speaks about tradition, He says: “Seldom, perhaps, does the word (tradition) appear except in a phrase of censure”. It means in English writings they don’t see the word ‘tradition’ in positive way.
He says about Englishmen’s attitude towards French Literature. Englishmen have a habit to feel proud on themselves. That is the proud for their creativity and more for their ‘less’ criticality. In French there is a mass of critical writing. Eliot compares English with French that they (French) have habit of critical method and English have habit of ‘conclusion’. He says:
“…we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are more critical than we; and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were less spontaneous”.

          Eliot seems quite in favor of such ‘criticality’. He thinks “criticism is as inevitable as breathing”. Then he talks about tradition. The Englishmen, while analyzing the poet, admire those aspects which are different from the poet’s predecessors. Means, they want to get ‘newness’ and ‘uniqueness’ from every poet to praise them. They always find isolation of the poet from his (mainly) immediate predecessors. Then Eliot says, if we put aside such prejudice; we can come to know that the poet’s individuality, which we are finding, is very much connected with his ancestors. According to Eliot the most individual part of any work is the part in which the dead poets are mirrored vigorously. And such resemblance is mostly seen in the period of maturity of the poet, not in the period of his adolescence. So, by this he asserts that tradition and individuality go together.