Tradition and the Individual Talent by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot publishes “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a critical essay that argues for greater understanding of the influence of canonical texts on any single writer and seeks to place the personality of the poet within a far greater tradition of literary voices and cultural ideas – prescient concepts that suggest ways in which AI may become valuable to writers. Three years later, in 1922, T.S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land, a landmark poem that freely interpolates material from a wealth of external sources, anticipating the synthesizing powers of large language models and deeply influencing the automated writing techniques of authors such as William Burroughs.

-Sasha Stiles

Image: Eliot in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell (Public Domain)