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Depersonalization
Traditional means adopting the customs or ways that have been handed down from one generation to the next. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot says that a poet is traditional when they receive what is handed down from the dead poets and keep the entire past of poetry alive in the present moment of their own work. To be traditional, the poet must develop the “consciousness of the past” throughout their entire life. What is more, traditional means self-sacrificial in Eliot’s vision. The traditional poet sacrifices their individuality and personality in order to fashion new feelings out of the usual emotions, thereby keeping the past alive in their work. Thus the traditional poet depersonalizes their work as much as possible. By the end of the essay, therefore, impersonal and traditional are one and the same: the poet is better able to make their art impersonal and of “significant emotion” if they surrender themselves to the past.
Traditional Quotes in Tradition and the Individual Talent
The Tradition and the Individual Talent quotes below are all either spoken by Traditional or refer to Traditional. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1
Quotes
We endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.
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This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
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To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.
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The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.
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But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.
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What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
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Part 2
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The mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
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Traditional Term Timeline in Tradition and the Individual Talent
The timeline below shows where the term Traditional appears in Tradition and the Individual Talent. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1
Eliot remarks that the English often don’t speak of tradition. Occasionally they will speak of the absence of tradition in writing; more often they will...
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However, Eliot cautions that tradition would be discouraged if it simply meant imitating the successes of one’s immediate ancestors. He...
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