T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Sacred Wood. 1921.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

“One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise an artist, upon those aspects of their work in which they least resemble anyone else. In these aspects or parts of their work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the person. We dwell with satisfaction upon the artist’s difference from their predecessors, especially their immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach an artist without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of their work may be those in which the dead artists, their ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a person to write not merely with their own generation in their bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of their 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 their place in time, of their contemporaneity."

“Their significance, their appreciation is the appreciation of their relation to the dead poets and artists. what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it."

“But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show."

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

“By an analogy, that the mind of the mature artist differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations."

“The mind of the artist is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the person themself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in them will be the person who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."

"The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings."

"The artist’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."

"The business of the artist is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into art, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all."

"Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiencing at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation."

"Art is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"The emotion of art is impersonal. And the artists cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering themselves wholly to the work to be done. And they are not likely to know what is to be done unless they live in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless they are conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."