The Labour of Tradition
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one 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 past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is 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. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; 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 (the really 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. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
We often assume that originality means excavating the self, pulling up something untouched by others. But Eliot suggests the opposite: that the new arrives only through an arduous conversation with what came before. Tradition, he insists, “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” This is not the labour of production but of absorption—developing a “historical sense” that feels the past as present, Homer as contemporary, the whole of literature as a “simultaneous order.”
When mechanical systems can instantly synthesize centuries of cultural memory, we might assume this labour has become unnecessary. If tradition is merely data, accessible in an instant, have we not inherited it by default? Yet Eliot warns that tradition is not repetition or adherence to immediate predecessors. It is the act of making the dead alive within us, of entering the existing order so completely that our arrival alters it “if ever so slightly.” We can delegate the gathering of influence, perhaps, but can we delegate the transformation? The new work changes the whole arrangement, reconfiguring “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole.” This requires not just knowledge but presence—a consciousness of one’s place in time that cannot be summoned through synthesis alone.
The difficulty remains: to create something that truly coheres, we must first obtain the tradition through our own effort, then surrender ourselves wholly to the work to be done. We stand at the threshold of vast libraries, but the door still requires the labour of becoming traditional. What we make from there depends on whether we enter as inheritors or as participants in the long, difficult conversation.