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Mr Milan Mondal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Narajole Raj College
ENGLISH (CC); SEM-III: PAPER- C6T (Tradition and individual Talent)
The concept of tradition and its relation to individual talent: A critical study
Perhaps no other essay of Eliot has been as influential in the shaping of literary criticism as Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917), published in The Egoist (1919), The Sacred Wood (1920) and in The Selected Essays (1932). In the essay Eliot puts forward a new concept of
‘tradition’ against the earlier one. For him the great fault of English criticism is that it ignores tradition. The term is regarded as one of censure. Eliot believes that if tradition only consists of “following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind and timid adherence to its success”; then it must be discouraged. However, a poet cannot be identified only with his or her individual voice. In a poet, his best and even most individual parts are those where “the dead poets, his ancestors, arrest their immortality most vigorously.”
The essay begins by referring to the absence of traditional elements in the contemporary writing. Eliot deploys the fact. As a matter of fact, the best parts of a poet’s work are there in which the traditional elements assert themselves. Tradition cannot be inherited, but can be obtained by much conscious labour.
Eliot’s new concept of tradition is related to a historical sense, an understanding of literature with its past associations and implications and its contemporary value also. Eliot defines the historical sense as a sense of timeless as well as temporal together. It involves a simultaneity of the past and the present. The historical sense makes a writer aware that the whole of European literature from the time of Homer to his own day constitutes a simultaneous order.
The original and modern writers need not imitate tradition, but respond to the tradition in his
Compiled, designed & circulated by:
Mr Milan Mondal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Narajole Raj College
ENGLISH (CC); SEM-III: PAPER- C6T (Tradition and individual Talent) understanding of what remains to be done and how he can rediscover and recreate older forms and themes.
No artist has any importance when considered alone. His significance is that of belonging to a tradition. To understand and judge the work of anew poet and artist one must compare and contrast with the other poets and artist in the tradition. He mentions that as a new poet is influenced by tradition, so a traditional order itself will be affected by the new. What he means is that just as the past writers help us in judging the new, so the new poets or artists will in return help us in judging the previous writers and artists. Thus, past is altered by the present and the present is directed by the past.
Eliot does have a clear view of tradition. Tradition is our cultural heritage. We know more than the dead writers did, precisely, because these dead writers are what we know. We are therefore conscious of the past in way the past cannot be. He insists on consciousness of the tradition.
Because of this consciousness, when a new work of art is produced, it changes our perception of all works of art which preceded it. The new work is compared to the tradition; nevertheless, simultaneously, tradition is also compared with the new work. When a new poet makes his entry into the stream of tradition and becomes part of the tradition, his very presence modifies that tradition. Thus, just as the present is an outgrowth of the past, so too the perception of the past is altered by the present. Judgement is therefore, not a matter of saying this is good or bad or how well a work fits into tradition. The poet is aware that he will be judged by the standards of the past: but while fitting in a test, individuality is also required. That is why Eliot emphasizes, “I say judged, not amputed by them.”
Compiled, designed & circulated by:
Mr Milan Mondal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Narajole Raj College
ENGLISH (CC); SEM-III: PAPER- C6T (Tradition and individual Talent) However, in order to be a part of an ongoing tradition, the poet must give up his insistence in his self. There must be “continual surrender” of the poet’s personality to “something which is more valuable”. Eliot argues that the poet exchanges satisfying his desire for self-expression in order to voice something far greater—the universal truth that connects all works of art together—and to help shape the ‘present moment’ of past tradition. While every poet starts from his own emotions and thoughts, he soon discovers the virtue of “a continual self-sacrifice, a work from its subjective origin to an objective existence”. That force to which the artist ultimately chooses to surrender the self— the ‘inner voice’ or the ‘outside authority’, determines the dualism between the subjective and the objective functions of art.The subjective and objective functions are often categorized and simplified into the romanticist and the classicist attitude towards the individual’s relation to works of art. The artist must emanate from the inner depths of himself or something external from him “to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself in order to earn and obtain his unique position” (The Function of Criticism).
This leads to the theory of impersonality. This theory relates that in order to create, a poet must surrender to tradition, to ‘mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind’. The poet combines various disparate elements to produce something new, but he himself only a catalyst and is unaffected. The poet’s business is to express the ordinary emotions whether he himself feels them or not, instead of searching for new emotions to be recollected in tranquility. Rather, functioning within the tradition offers the poet more positive rewards and freedom by dismantling all illusions. “To be judged by the standards of the past,
Compiled, designed & circulated by:
Mr Milan Mondal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Narajole Raj College
ENGLISH (CC); SEM-III: PAPER- C6T (Tradition and individual Talent) not amputed by them” means that the implication of the individual talent for the ends of tradition should not be taken negatively as a form of imprisonment. Instead, it actually brings a more genuine sense of liberation and achievement than can ever be altered by romantic expression. To be impersonal is therefore to surrender one’s individual ego to tradition.
Eliot’s emphasis on tradition, in this way, is not beyond criticism. He has been accused of being too conservative. Critics complain that he saw history as static and tradition as a timeless whole.
Ralph Fox particularly protested that a past is not merely his cultural heritage; Eliot’s view of the poet as only a catalyst is too passive. However, Eliot makes it clear that “To conform merely would be for the new work not to conform at all; it would not be new and therefore not be work of art.” Therefore, art must be new and it must transgress upon the old, changing the past as well as the present. So does the poet he rewards or (re) creates, not now art but new form in an individual expression.
