In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree
to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the
manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.
It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those
aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and
pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most
enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we
shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his
work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously,” he continued.
