Extracts from 'Tradition & Individual Talent' - T.S.Eliot

Hello all,

I recently re-read the above essay, also in order to give it as a 'perspective' reading for my students' final assignment. It is remarkable in many respects, and Naresh felt the whole / parts would be worth sharing here.

So please find below some extracts from the same, that I have been taken up by. Please note:

1. It is NOT, NOT in ANY WAY, a response or continuation to Athanji's efforts. It is ONLY a matter of timing that I revisit this now. In fact, I ask the students to replace the word 'poet' with 'architect' and poetry with 'architecture' when they read.

2. For those interested in the essay itself (less than 5 page-sides), I have it in soft, but have no idea how to attach it herewith, with or without copyright issues. You can a) tell me how or b) download yourself. Its available in many versions through simple googling.

3. I have assigned a 'Satsangham' label to this, but it can easily fall under several! Someone who has formed the labels (I'm ignorant of the acronyms), please read and re-assign as felt appropriate.

*****************

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;
...
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.
...
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone ... The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
...
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—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.
...
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.
Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.
...
There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and
there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

*********************

Hope found interesting.

I may add that in addition to coming from someone whose work I deeply admire, AND finding it demonstrated in his own work, I have found resonance with what he says, in my own work (teaching and writing), and that only adds to its significance.

Anand