In his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot
said that "not only the best, but the most individual parts of
[the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his
ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."1 The
poet's ancestors are those to whom he is indebted for all that
he has inherited—his language, his sensibility, his outlook, and
his standards of conduct. He acknowledges his debt by letting
these forebears speak through his work. Paradoxically, the more
freely and fully he allows them to speak—which is to say the
less he self-indulgently tries to make his work appear original
with him—the more completely his work bears the stamp of his
individuality. Tradition provides discipline; out of the
discipline springs the unselfconscious and uncontrived quality
of all good writing, which in this essay we will call
"spontaneity." Eliot wrote this essay before he was converted to
Anglicanism. He thought he was describing a general cultural
phenomenon, which is that a cultural