From Past to Present

For most writers and authors the plight for explanation and futher understanding of other and self can be a daunting task. T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” implores the ideas and concepts of writers and their traditions or talents. For everyone the expression that surfaces in their writing is a representation of our personal tradition and talents.
Eliot delves in to other’s writings and how it is they come to express themselves within the confines of their writings. “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.” As Eliot sees things the way in which a writer represents himself is based upon other writers and how their respective writings have reflected upon them.

We are all in many ways influenced by others whether we like it or not. “I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has every been written.” Eliot derived a lot of the meaning he found in all forms of writing based upon how it came to be. Eliot describes in this case how poems as they are related to other poems and how that relation essentially makes or breaks them. Writing like many things in life comes from a long line of antecessors who have affected the way we write even today. Eliot essentially claims that writings of many different forms are; only because the once were. We as humans use writings of the past to help change the way in which we write in the now, and as we look towards the future.