The Centennial of T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'

At the New Yorker, read Kevin Dettmar's article about the fruition (and reception) of T.S. Eliot's "most important essay" "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Dettmar explains that "[s]ometime during the early days of September, 1919, T. S. Eliot—just thirty years old and working as a clerk in the foreign-exchange division of Lloyds Bank in London—sat down and wrote his manifesto as a poet and critic, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent.' Its effects were hardly immediate." Picking up from there: 

The essay appeared in the September and December, 1919, issues of The Egoist, the London-based little magazine for which Eliot had been serving as an assistant editor since June, 1917. These would turn out to be the last issues that the magazine would publish. A “Notice to Readers” in the December issue announced a hiatus for 1920; the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver wanted to focus her energies on publishing books. That pause would prove to be a full stop. Not many could have been disappointed at the announcement: The Egoist, by its end, boasted a print run of just four hundred, and a mere forty-five subscribers. In “Paradise Lost,” Milton argued for the sufficiency of a “fit audience . . . though few”—but there are limits.

Though “Tradition” was initially seen only by a coterie audience, it is Eliot’s most important essay—and arguably, the most influential English-language literary essay of the twentieth century. From that modest début, its reach has grown exponentially. Within a year, the piece was included in Eliot’s first critical collection, “The Sacred Wood,” published in November, 1920. It subsequently appeared in the three other volumes assembled by Eliot, including “Selected Essays,” which itself went through three different editions. In that collection, “Tradition” has the pole position.

And it wasn’t the first choice of Eliot alone. “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” that canon-creating textbook par excellence, has included the essay in every one of its ten editions, dating back to 1962; in that first edition, Eliot is the only twentieth-century poet whose criticism is represented. “Tradition” is further reproduced in all nine editions of Norton’s American-literature anthology (as an American expatriate, Eliot is hard on taxonomies, and both the British and the Americans tend to claim him) and many other literature textbooks. The essay has been an important part of the literature survey curriculum for more than half a century. “Tradition” is the criticism that critics read when they’re figuring out that they want to be critics. In the literature and literary criticism of the twentieth century, it’s simply unavoidable.

Continue reading at the New Yorker.