T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” concerns itself with the literary text and how it relates to the reader, the writer, and the “real” world. Tradition, Eliot states, represents a knowledge of a historical sense, i.e. a feeling of history leading back to Homer that appears in the original artist’s work. The artist combines her/his temporal experience with that of the timelessness of all literature. Indeed, states Eliot, no artist has significance alone; it is derived from his/her relation to those who have come before. When the new art is released into history, continues Eliot, it, having been influenced by historical art, also influence past works in relation to the new addition to the whole. Art never changes, but the material of art keeps it new. The material, or text, is Eliot’s main focus, but its relation to the other aspects of Aristotle’s semiotic, especially “reality,” are equally important.
Aristotle’s semiotic may be visualized as a triangle which represents the text. The triangle’s various points are labeled “writer,” “reader,” and “reality” (or subject matter). Each of these elements interact to create the text, but existing texts — one of Eliot’s points — also influence the various points of the semiotic. Indeed, art, reality, and subjectivity cannot be separated. Eliot uses a catalyst as an analogy for this process. A strip of platinum present when mixing oxygen and sulfur dioxide, a sulfurous acid is formed; the platinum remains unaffected. If the platinum represents the poet’s mind, then, Eliot states, the oxygen and sulfur dioxide are emotions and feelings that affect and are affected by the poet’s mind, producing a new work of art, or the text. Interestingly enough, the feelings, or words and phrases used to create the text, and emotions exist in all three elements of the semiotic. A creator of art cannot live in a vacuum; s/he must have the influences of feeling and emotion — especially those feelings and emotions of past texts — or his/her mind will remain unaffected.
As mentioned above, the history of literature forms a whole. The artist’s new creation will, in the artist lives within a society, necessarily be affected by this rich tradition. In fact, escaping the history of writers would be impossible, unless the artist was born and raised on Mars. The dead poets, states Eliot, are our culture — they are what we know. While the artist is undoubtedly influenced by his/her particular, temporal culture, represented by the outside of the semiotic — the history of literature, i.e. that many texts that constitute its wholeness, is both present within the artist’s text and the history of the culture in general. Everyone has heard the expression “All the world’s a stage,” but how many people know it is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It? Eliot’s point seems valid. While not all artists have had the affect on society that Shakespeare has had, even Shakespeare was influenced by previous artists, fitting him into the textual wholeness of our culture.
But in order for a text to conform, it must rebel. Eliot makes the distinction between a work just aping its predecessors and one that is original. The latter, while an act of rebellion, is necessary in order to be creative and new, thus adding to the history of art. By rebelling, new art conforms. Yet, Eliot cautions, the poet must not search for the new emotions — this activity will only lead to the “perverse” — but s/he must look for new feelings and mediums for expressing them.
The poet, however, is not the most important element in Eliot’s semiotic. He suggests that the fusion that takes place between the poet’s mind, emotion, and feeling makes art — not the poet’s personality, but her/his medium. The medium lets unique “impressions and experiences combine in particular and unexpected ways” to form the original text (“Tradition” 31). Eliot suggests, by way of example, Keats feelings and reactions to the nightingale have nothing to do with the bird itself, but the bird, possibly because of its estimation in society, was able to evoke those feelings on that particular occasion. Indeed, the text, for Eliot, represents the most important part of the semiotic, for it is a most interesting and original combination of the other elements that is simultaneously universal and very particular.
Finally, Eliot emphasizes the text, not the poet, as the focus of his study. He suggests that the escape from personal history and emotions will endow the artist with the ability to create a new text. In an escape from the particular, and a surrender to the unconscious wholeness of the semiotic, a new expression of feeling may be created — a new text added to the rich historical tradition of our culture’s artistic expression, changing both the present and the past.
