T. S. Eliot: Tradition and the individual talent

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Thomas Steams Eliot: 20th cent. Angle-American poet and critic. He belongs to the New Critical Formalist literary theory, and is " classicist in nature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion." (1089)

"Objective Correlative": " The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." (1090)

The Waste Land: Eliot's " Epic of decay ". it manifests Eliot's formalist theory as expressed in " tradition and the individual talent through the usage of techniques such as allusions, imagery, and experimentations with style.

Tradition and the Individual Talent; An essay in which Eliot defines tradition, art, and the artist, and how they are connected.

A. "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone." (1093)

1- " The most individual parts of his work may be those in which dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality' most vigorously. "(1093)

2- " The historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable ... involves a perception, not only of the pastiness of the past, but of its presence." (1093)

B. " Novelty is better than repetition."(1093)

1- Tradition is not "following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes." (1093)

2- If the work of art merely conformed without adding anything, then "it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art ". (1093)

3- " It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or prevents poetic sensibility." (1094)

C. "The existing monuments form an...