Tradition and the Individual Talent

In a sense, Eliot's tradition resembles what structuralist linguists call "langue" and the individual talent or piece of writing resembles "parole." Writers do not invent ex nihilo, as romantics...

Eliot's main claim is that "the poet, the man, and the poet, the artist are two different entities." We can understand this assertion at different levels. First, for Eliot, the poet's experience of...

In T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he argues that the past and the present are both important aspects of tradition. Consider the main point of the first part of the...

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot takes issue with the received wisdom (which he sees as a characteristic fallacy of Romanticism) that the originality of a great poet lies in his...

T. S. Eliot's Objective Theory essentially states that a poem or piece of literature should have a sense of inevitability. The idea is that the feelings and emotions should be clear and directly...

Eliot argues for what he calls the "impersonality" of poetry. For Eliot, "poetry" is a living thing, a tradition that is both past and present which, in the West, stretches back to Homer. Poetry...

In the course of his influential essay “Traditional and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot makes a number of key points, including the following: Ideally, poetic “tradition” does not refer simply...

T.S. Eliot viewed Western cultural/artistic history as a continuum wherein contemporary artists are inevitably influenced and shaped by the artists that came before them. Eliot argues that in order...