Ayesha Gulzar

Teacher: Ma’am Aisha

Roll: 161651017
Semester: 6 Bs (6)
4-03-19

Eliot’s concept of Tradition

Tradition for Eliot has a complex character. Tradition helps the new writers to be
modern. In order to move forward one should look to the past. He stressed through
this essay the importance of contemporary writers. In short knowledge of writers
of the past makes contemporary writers both part of the tradition and part of the
contemporary scene Elliot’s own poetry is somehow in the tradition of Homer and
Dante and the in the work of modern poet and it is because his debt to Homer and
Dante that he is both traditional and modern.
Tradition gives the reader something new, something interesting, something
intellectual and something vital for literary conception. According to Eliot it is a part
of the living culture inherited from the past and functioning in formation of the
present. Eliot maintains that tradition is bound with historical sense which is a
perception that past is not past, it is not something invalid and lost. It is a living
culture. It has an important function in shaping the true present. It still exerts
influence in our ideas, thoughts. Past and present lies side by side in space.

We can take an example when a new work take place in the order. Its arrival and
inclusion modifies the order and relationship among all works. The order is than
modified. A new work of art influences the old members of the family it is this sense
that the present modifies the past and the past modifies the present. We also look
towards the past for renewing the present perspective. A new work of art cannot
be evaluated without comparison with the dead.
Most of the poets look back to old contemporaries also because “the dead
writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.”
Tradition is the living stream it is not a lump of dead. The poet must be very
conscious of the main current which does not at all flow invariably through the
most distinguished reputation. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that
art never improves but that the material of art is never quite the same.
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance it cannot be inherited and if you
want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves in the first place the historical
sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to
be a poet beyond his twenty fifth year and the historical sense involves a perception
not only of the pastness of the pas, but of his presence; the historical sense compels
a man to write not merely with his own generation in the bones but with a feeling
that whole of literature composes simultaneous order.
Thus it is important for a poet to be traditional to maintain his position among
the famous poets of the World.