ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -"Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot’s first book of criticism, “The Sacred Wood” (1920). The essay is also available in Eliot’s “Selected Prose” and “Selected Essays".

Detailed explanation-2: -Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he then argues that poetry should be essentially “impersonal, ” that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer.

Detailed explanation-3: -"Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T. S. Eliot is a 1919 critical essay about the relationship between the individual poet or author and the canon of literature that precedes the poet. Eliot argues that great poets are not simply original but are in conversation with the literary tradition.

Detailed explanation-4: -According to Eliot’s conception tradition-and the individual talent go together. Tradition is the gift of the historic sense. A. writer with this sense of tradition is fully conscious of his own generation, of his place in the present; but he is also acutely conscious of his relationship with the writers of the past.

Detailed explanation-5: -Eliot criticism has always emphasized on objectivity rather than subjectivity. This essence also makes him a classicist. His impersonality theory focuses on objective art and he criticizes the Romantic poetry for its subjectivity especially Wordsworth’s theory of poetry of “recollection in tranquility”.