That which we know

T.S Eliot's ideas about tradition which he expresses in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" have led me to contemplate a few things. He discusses the importance of tradition as something that we must obtain "by great labour" (1093). It takes not mere marination in the fact that tradition is what brought us where we are today, but it requires intentional studying and reading of writers of the past. This idea resonates with why I chose to be an English major with a literature emphasis. I chose to be an English major because I enjoy writing a decent amount, but I felt that my writing was ill-educated because I hadn't read enough. As I've progressed though four years of literature classes that focused on studying other people's writing, it has often left me itching to write something of my own that isn't simply in response to what other people have written. But after reading so much, I feel much better equipped to write anything on my own.

While studying poetry and literature of the past has its benefits, there is so much literature to be read. Eliot even notes, "The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition" (1094). And while he dismisses it by saying that other people have done it so it can be done, over time more and more literature comes about. We're living about a century after Eliot, and that means an extra century of literature that exists as tradition to us.
I still have to agree with Eliot's general idea of studying and reading the writer's that make up our tradition. He writes, "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did'. Precisely, and they are that which we know" (1094). It's true that regard a lot of really old writing as just painful to read because it's so far removed from where we are today, but I guess it really is part of what we are today.