Defunct "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot.
In this dual role, he acted as a cultural critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
This essay is divided into three parts: first the concept of "Tradition," then the Theory of Impersonal Poetry, and finally the conclusion.
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 claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.
This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition.
When a poet engages in the creation of new work, they realise an aesthetic "ideal order," as it has been established by the literary tradition that has come before them.
Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation.
In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet.
The theory is that the expression of emotion in art can be achieved by a specific, and almost formulaic, prescription of a set of objects, including events and situations.
Instead, talent is acquired through a careful study of poetry, claiming that Tradition, "cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour."
For example, Harold Bloom disagrees with Eliot's condescension towards Romantic poetry, which, in The Metaphysical Poets (1921) he criticises for its "dissociation of sensibility."
Eliot was arguing the importance of a complete sensibility: he didn't particularly care what it was at the time of tradition and the individual talent.
T. S. Eliot is the one major poet whose work bears evidence of intercourse with this aspect of Indian culture" (qtd.
In 1964, his last year, Eliot published in a reprint of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1932 and 1933, a new preface in which he called "Tradition and the Individual Talent" the most juvenile of his essays (although he also indicated that he did not repudiate it.