My True Love, or, Admiring Dead Poetical Critics

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance [than reptition]. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense ... a a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, bt of its presence ... a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional ... the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past.


What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality ... [the] process of depersonalization.
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express: and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse."

-"Tradition and the Individual Talent"