The relation of the one to the whole

The singular channel supported by tradition is explored by T.S. Eliot’s brilliant essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” published in 1919 in opposition to the manifestos by Marinetti and Tristan Tzara demanding a rupture between the art of the present and that of the past. Objecting to the demand for originality as the warrant of a poet’s value, Eliot speaks of the simultaneous existence of the whole tradition of the past for the experience of any modern writer. “The necessity that the writer shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided;” Eliot writes, “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past

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