What are the main points in T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?

T.S Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is very metaphysical in its concepts; definitions of his main points are only understood within the context of the quantum metaphysical realm. Some of the main points in T.S. Eliot's essay are tradition, isolation, knowledge, and catylyst. By "tradition" Eilot means that all past poets comprise a simultaneous existence and order into which the new poet or artist is immersed or joined: tradition are those long historical lines of poets who stretch back through Spenser, Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccacio and all of them to Homer. This suggests that no poet ever writes in true isolation--the true meaning of an artist's work--is valued according to the whole tradition. Eliot suggested that at any given moment the tradition, the historical whole of past poetic or artisitic work, is complete, is an organized whole. When a new poem or other work of art is created it is subsumed by all that have gone before--the organized whole past tradition--and in being subsumed alters the nature of the whole: Each added piece of a created work of art or poetry alters and enriches the tradition, which is always an organized whole.

Eliot contends that knowledge--upon which inspiration and creation depend and from which the creative work attains excellence--is the collective wisdom and experience of all past poets, and the attainment of knowledge by the new poet is the submersion of self and ego into the collective tradition. Eliot uses this to state that the mind of the poet or other artist is a catalyst for the creative process, not the controller of the creative process. A catalyst is the initiating event that causes a thing--in this case creative art or poetry--to happen. The mind is a catalyst that stores up impressions until they ripen into an inspiration for the production of art or poetry. The poet or artist doesn't express personal self or personal traits, instead the poet or artist expresses a collective experience or emotion that is based on all the tradition that has existed before and is descriptive of the human emotion and experience that is present at the moment of the poem's or art work's creation.

What is T. S. Eliot's view on historical sense in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?

Eliot writes about "historical sense" in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." He writes that the historical sense "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence" and it is "a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional." 

In this essay, Eliot does not describe "traditional" as old-fashioned. Rather, for him, traditional means that a poem is a particular part of the general whole of all poetry in history. The individual talent emerges from an awareness of his/her present poetic contribution and epoch as a continuation of that history of poetry. The present poet who is aware of his/her place AND the whole of this history is more able to be individual. 

In this essay, Eliot also describes the good poet as one who does not dwell on emotion or his/her own personality. For Eliot, "emotion reflected in tranquility," the Romantic ethos for good poetry, is an inadequate formula for poetry. For Eliot, the poet must depersonalize himself and treat his mind more like a medium for a chemical reaction. Therefore, the poet's mind, in order to create new poetry in a traditional continuum, must act as a catalyst, applying pressure and new combinations of the already established, traditional elements in the reaction. 

This analogy of the chemical reaction and combining things in new combinations is similar to Eliot's ideas about the individuality of a poet within a continuing poetic tradition. To know the past traditions (to become historically aware = historical sense), the poet must labor as a chemist learns about former experiments, elements, reactions, combinations, etc. Only then, by divorcing his personality from his poetic creation, can the poet immerse his work within the historical medium of all poetry throughout history. Another way to think of this is that the entire history of poetry is one giant chemical reaction. A new poem which has individuality and historical sense will not only be informed by the past, but since it is part of the entire history of poetry, it will affect interpretations of the poems of the past as well. In this sense, historical sense is indispensable for the mature poet and every poem with historical sense affects every other poem in history. 

Like the chemical reaction that Eliot uses as an analogy of the poet's depersonalized mind, each element (poem) in this historical tradition of poetry affects every other element (poem). The past informs the present poetry. And if the present poetry was created with this historical sense, then the present poetry will also inform the past. 

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 should be measured, he argues, not by its ability to express the personality of the poet but by its connection to the tradition from which it emerges. Great poetry exists in dialog with the poetry that came before it:

No poet...has his complete meaning alone. His significance...is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

In this way, Eliot seeks to separate poetry as an object in itself from the personality of the poet who created it. In fact, the artistic development of the poet is understood as progress toward the "extinction of personality," a kind of "self-sacrifice" for one's art. Instead of reflecting her own personality, the work of the mature poet lies in their ability to create new combinations of poetic effects or feelings based on the relation of her art to that of the "tradition."

Eliot means this in a specific, even scientific, way. He uses an analogy from chemistry, the reaction of platinum to a catalyst of oxygen and sulphuric dioxide: in Eliot's formulation, the platinum is akin to the "mind of the poet," which transmutes the oxygen and sulphuric dioxide into sulphurous acid while being unchanged itself. While the emotions of the poet are essential to the process of making poetry, they are, like the platinum, not affected or included in the art that is produced.

In this, Eliot takes exception to Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility." For Eliot, poetry is none of that: it is instead a deliberate attempt to construct new art from one's relation to the poetic tradition.

What is the role of individual talent in T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?

The role of the individual talent in the creative process, as expressed by T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," is to recognize the long accumulation--the tradition--of poets who comprise an organized whole into which the new poet's mind must be imersed in order to access all the accumulated knoweldge that resides in tradition (as Eliot defines tradition). The poet's mind can then be an active repository for all the feelings, images and phrases comprising tradition until all the particles needed for creation are accummulated, at which time the poet's mind is the catalyst to turn impressions of feeling, images and phrases into a new creation of poetry that will be subsumed into the organized whole of tradition, joining tradition and thereby altering it for the next poets.

Discuss T. S. Eliot's "impersonal theory" of poetry in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

At the end of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot writes:

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.

Eliot's view is that the poet does not express his or her personality through poetry, but is instead submerged in the demands of the poetry itself. This is a response to and rejection of the Romantic theory, propounded by Wordsworth, that the poem has its origins in the emotions of the poet. Eliot replies that the process of writing poetry, far from being an expression of individuality, is "a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

Eliot insists on the complete separation of the poet from the poem. Once he has written a poem, he says, it is no longer his, and his relationship with it is the same as that of any other reader. This is why the impersonal nature of poetry is so important, since the poem must have a universal quality which speaks equally to all readers. A Romantic might make a similar claim, but the universality would be based on emotion, whereas Eliot regards poetry as an escape from emotion as well as personality.

What is T.S. Eliot's concept of "tradition" and "individual talent" in his essay?

T.S. Eliot was a renowned literary critic as well as poet. In 1919 he wrote the critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Ironically in a 1964 publication of lectures given at Harvard University in the 1930s, he labeled "Tradition and the Individual Talent" a juvenile work, though without denying its statements.

The concepts that Eliot lays out in the essay are that today's poetry of genius is inescapably built on the traditions of a culture's forerunners in poetry and that talent is the poet's ability to master the tradition of poetry and give it voice in new poetry that represents the poet's current day culture.

The poet's task is to study the masters of earlier times and incorporate their genius into his work, thereby echoing what Elliot called the "mind of Europe." Though an innovative new application to literary endeavors, the notion that creative breakthroughs come only following rigorous study of the previous masters had previously been a cornerstone of training in the physical arts, e.g., painting and sculpture.

Discuss T. S. Eliot's Objective Theory from his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

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 linked with actions, to the point where the outcome is a logical conclusion and understanding of the individual's emotions or motivations. In terms of a poem, while the emotions and experiences of the poet are all swirling around as a many-layered thing, the final result should be a cohesive expression of a unified idea. A poem should express one concept or emotion. It can be an incredibly unique and complex one, but there should be an overarching tone or mood to a successful piece of poetry.

In terms of storytelling, there should be objective and clear motivations and emotions. Eliot analyzes the play Hamlet and concludes that the character of Hamlet is poorly written, because his emotions and choices are not indicative of the events that happen to him in the story. Lady Macbeth is juxtaposed against this, though, as someone that is successfully written—the events of the story lead to a natural response, and the reader or observer can relate and, presumably, would take similar actions given the same set of circumstances.

T. S. Eliot’s Objective Theory stated, in the simplest terms, that whereas poetry for the romantic poets was the product of emotion, thus a manifestation of emotional pleasure or pain, poetry was in reality a structure of nonemotional objective unity. According to Eliot, the poet carries within his mind a multiplicity of experiences, thoughts, emotions upon which the poet imposes order and from which emerges a unity. Thus is a new “artistic emotion" created that is unique to the poem. Therefore, the critic is to judge a poem based on objective rationality of the unity created. In other words, does the poem present a whole unit of intelligibility produced from a multiplicity of disparate parts. Think of The Waste Land when considering this concept. Some can argue that The Waste Land presents elements of irrationality and hyper-emotionalism, yet, all the disparate parts fit together as a whole unit producing a poem that is more than the sum of the parts of the poet’s collection of emotions and experiences.

Describe T. S. Eliot's "impersonal theory" of poetry in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

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 emotion is unimportant. The poet's job is to create a product which can then be meaningful to an audience, not to have a deep emotional experience themselves. We can compare this idea to the idea of a musician who becomes so overwhelmed by emotion while performing that their performance becomes sloppy. For Eliot, the poet is a medium through which the poetry comes forth, and the poet being impersonal allows the poetry to be diluted less.

Further, Eliot stresses the distinction between the poetic voice and the personal voice of the poet, emphasizing that while poetry may be autobiographic, it need not be and should not compromise the quality of the poetry in order to be true to personal history. Eliot's theory as a whole intensely prioritizes the quality of the poetry at the expense of the experience of the poet. Personally, I don't find this approach attractive, but it obviously worked for Eliot.

What are T. S. Eliot's main ideas in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?

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 to what has been done in the recent past but to the whole history of the art. Serious poets have an obligation to familiarize themselves with the history of poetry, and doing so requires hard work. Merely and slavishly imitating one’s immediate predecessors is not at all the kind of attention to tradition that Eliot values.
• The serious poet must write with a strong sense of the present but also with a strong sense of the best aspects of past writing; the poet must somehow help to imbue the writing s/he does today with an awareness of the best previous writing, over hundreds and even thousands of years.  As Eliot puts it,

the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

• To properly value a poet’s work, readers and critics must compare it with all the best poetry that has been done before:

You cannot value [the poet] alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

• Any really important new work of poetry inevitably affects our view of all the best poetry written in the past. Just as we compare and contrast a new work with the works of the past, so we now compare and contrast that new work to the works of the traditional canon. Our view of past works affects our view of the new work, and vice versa.
• The focus of the best criticism should not be the life of the poet but on the actual poetry s/he has written.
• The best poetry is not merely personal self-expression but is the achievement of a kind of impersonal art, in which the artistry is most important. What matters is not what the poet personally felt but what the poet was able to get down effectively on paper:

To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad.