Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition.

This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet's greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors he argues that 'the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.' Eliot claims that this 'historical sense' is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.

A poet must embody 'the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer,' while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment. It represents a 'simultaneous order,' by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. appear except in a phrase of censure,' was actually a thus-far unrealised element of literary criticism.įor Eliot, the term 'tradition' is imbued with a special and complex character. Eliot, a classicist, felt that the true incorporation of tradition into literature was unrecognised, that tradition, a word that 'seldom. He wishes to correct the fact that, as he perceives it, 'in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.' Eliot posits that, though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses through change – a separation from tradition, literary advancements are instead recognised only when they conform to the tradition.

This essay is divided into three parts: first the concept of 'Tradition,' then the Theory of Impersonal Poetry, and finally the conclusion.Įliot presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it.

Selected poems by ts eliot