If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged … 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 … 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 own contemporaneity.
— T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
One Comment
Henry Lewis
Fascinating! I did not know this existed. Thank you. T.S. Elliot is clearly a master. I will be studying this essay again and again for there is always more to be gleaned.