What is T. S. Eliot's theory of tradition?
My concept of tradition is not a mere veneration of the past but a dynamic engagement with it. It is a historical sense, a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, that informs contemporary creation. One does not write in a vacuum; rather, the artist must apprehend the whole of European literature from Homer to the present moment, and understand his own place within it. This requires a constant revaluation of the past in light of the present, and indeed, a recognition that the present moment itself is altered by the introduction of a new work of art into the historical order.
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