Tradition is not only the first word in the title, it is also Eliot’s first topic in the essay. The primacy that he gives to tradition in poetry and art establishes the framework within which Eliot’s theories emerge. The poet’s obligation to tradition is to know it. To write only from individual experience is to limit oneself to a fraction of possible material. He argues that to get beyond themselves, poets must develop a historical sense—a sense of those who came before. Paradoxically, the most individual characteristics of a poem may be those drawn from dead poets but made new by writers of the present. Attention to tradition creates this type of novel poetry.

The historical sense is more than a sense of what has passed. It is timelessness, always past and present. When poets are rooted in tradition, they inhabit a timeless realm because they are, Eliot writes, “more acutely conscious of [their] place in time, of [their] own contemporaneity” (37). Eliot’s theories of time also change how the present views the past: “[T]he past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (37). Tradition is reciprocal from past to present and present to past.