This document discusses the relationship between tradition and individual works of literature. It argues that no work is ever completely original, as all poems draw influence from important precursor texts. However, tradition should not just be blindly following the previous generation, but rather obtained through significant effort. A work's relationship to what came before is important, while still allowing room for new ideas and innovation from the individual artist.

1. “No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong
enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.”
Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 1972

2. Student Work

20. “If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the
ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence
to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged.
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be
inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1936