 Leading modernist poet T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was also an important conservative thinker, and so occupies an ambivalent position. His essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) argued that true originality is possible only within a tradition, which is a living presence in the modern world, not a museum relic (Eliot 1919; see Hamilton 2009). Eliot’s notion of an artistic tradition, and the related notion of a living classic, helps to elucidate the conservative notion of a living tradition—a classic is something that has stood the test of time, and is the subject of continuing reference and allusion. There are “dead classics” or “dead traditions”—performing arts with rigid repertoires such as that of Gregorian chant, which became closed by the time of the Renaissance. In contrast, the classical repertoire of Western art music, as it had evolved from the 18th century to the present, is open and flexible. It operates—when circumstances are propitious—as a living presence in contemporary culture. On a less exalted aesthetic level, in the same sense the tuxedo is a living sartorial classic.