T.S ELLIOT AND TRADITION

No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. This literary observation is proposed by T.S. Elliot in his essay ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’ published in 1917. Tradition, according to Elliot, is a price of great labour. People in the present do not have tradition just like that but they have to gain it with the effort to understand the tradition itself. Tradition is something that passes down toward generation boldly because each generation will try to learn and understand the tradition from they has in their historical sense.

Elliot described in his observation that in any work of art, there must be the trace of the work in the past. And also to analyze a work of art, we should put it side by side with the work from the past. We do this thing not to judge which one of them better than the other but to compare and to contrast one to another aesthetically because from the very beginning there is already a structural order of art in every culture. The aesthetic value of a poem which we try to compare and contrast is purely about the poem itself, not then life of the poet.
The work of art in the present is only the continuation of the existing order of art. If we try to measure the work of art without the previous work, we could not find the real value of that work because the value of a work of art is in its position in the simultaneous order of art in tradition. The work of a poet in the present contains the poet’s appreciation toward the works of the earlier poet. This appreciation is the result of the poet’s historical sense. The historical sense which the poet has is not only deal with the pastness of the past but also the presence of the past in the present. The historical sense of the artist is the result of his knowledge upon the work of artists in the past and his experience in his youth period.
The poet could takes he past as his standpoint in creating his work. The poet should be aware that the order never changes; the existence of the art itself never changes but the material to build the art always changing. An artist should always aware that he should become the part of this order; he will never stand alone as an individual in art. That is why an artist should have a good knowledge about this order, about artists who came before him. He should sacrifice himself, his personality to acquire his position in this order.
The good criticism of art should always put the work of art as the main point of analysis in its criticism, not the artist’s life. A good work of art will always apart from the artist’s life. The artist should be able to create his work as his manifestation of his observation. The better the artist, the more he depersonalizes his work. The good criticism will show the work in the present’s position in the existing order of art. The good criticism will try to find the race of the work in the past in the work of the present.
The mind of the artist just becomes the media to produce the creativity of art without making any obvious influence in it. In his mind, an artist will treat the emotion he discovers from external world to transfer in his work. The work of art is the artist’s creativity to materialize his observation toward the world. The emotion that he put in the work is not his personal emotion but it is the emotion that he extracts from the outer world. If an artist able to gather more emotion in his work, the work will be better. He artist should be able to arrange and organize the emotion in his work to make it more artistic.