Tradition and the Individual Talent

One of the most influential texts in modern literary criticism, this early essay (first published in 1919) laid out the basic tenets of Eliot’s poetics and criticism. Although he famously called for a “self-sacrificing” of personality on the part of the poet, the essay charts a highly personal engagement with history and tradition, one in which the past lives inside the present, and is altered by it as a result.