'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Revisited

Commentators have long been aware of the striking parallels between T. S. Eliot's essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, his seminal theoretical statement, and ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, one of the more substantial of his uncollected pieces of the same period. Until now, however, the relationship between these two documents has not been properly understood. In fact ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’ constitutes a revision of the first part of its more widely disseminated companion piece, one that modifies and re-purposes its author's most famous theoretical provocations in a number of important ways. Intriguing in and of itself, this act of revision acquires added significance in the context of passages in Eliot's correspondence from late 1919 relating to The Art of Poetry, a treatise on the degeneracy of contemporary verse that he planned to write for publication by the Egoist Press in the spring of 1920.