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Abstract
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Introduction
T. S. Eliot was a very influential poet and critic who has exerted a great influence on many poets in the world. His emphasis on the universality of literature is very famous because he considered classical literature very important and believed that poets and critics should be constant readers and followers of the ancient classical literature. He considered himself a classicist in literature. As a classicist, he strongly advocated tradition, and allusion. This meant that poets should follow traditions and stick to them throughout their poetic life and career, and their poetry should be allusive. Thus, allusion is bound up with tradition in Eliot and his followers. This allusion gestures towards intertextuality and influence in poets. In “Tradition and Individual Talent,” he states, the essay is one of the famous works that Eliot wrote as a literary critic. The essay expresses Eliot’s significant conception of the connection between the poet and previous literary backgrounds. In the essay, Eliot offers his idea of tradition and the characterization of the poet and poetry concerning tradition. He asserts that in literature we hardly ever talk about tradition, nevertheless we infrequently make use of its name in condemning its absence. Eliot postulates that, even though the English tradition commonly supports the credence that art develops through transformation – a departure from tradition, literary improvements is alternatively distinguished only when they follow the tradition. Eliot as a follower of classical literature and hence tradition believed that the accurate amalgamation of tradition into literature was not observed as a necessary and vital thing (37).
Eliot advocated the themes and techniques of classical writers and in this regard. He is an influential critic since he felt that a poet should be a follower of classical poets and writers. Even the word allusion is linked very much to the idea of influence on the grounds that allusion refers to
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