T.S. Elliot's "Tradition And The Individual Talent" And Alain Locke's "The New Negro

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(1405).
Critics were in effect using tradition only to describe something quaint
and archaic. The problem with this view is that it creates the
misconception among the general public that good poetry is not at all
related to anything that has been done before, and it must instead be
something entirely new to be good.
This misconception was especially destructive because it caused
people to ignore the influence of great writers of the past upon
contemporary ones. Elliot states that "…in critical writing we tend to look
for what is original in a piece of work if we like it, so therefore do not
pay attention to what elements are traditional" (ibid.). Further, he states
that "One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our
tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work
in which he least resembles anyone else" (ibid.). The task of the modern
critic when studying a piece of a work should not be limited to finding out
how a poet is ...

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to write about, did not evolve in a vacuum. There is a
definite foundation that he is building upon, if indeed he is a good writer.

Elliot believes that the contemporary views of what the word
"tradition" meant are incorrect. He states that "…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" (1406). Thus, being traditional does
not mean that the artist is simply parroting the past, but instead has a
real understanding of it, and a facility with using it to create something
new. When speaking of the true artist Elliot states, "…his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets ...

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