Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent: A Review of Mary Lythgoe Bradford's Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays
Keywords
book review, tradition, Mormonism
Abstract
In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot writes that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.”1 This has always underscored for me the importance of knowing your literary tradition, of reading widely and deeply, and of exposing yourself to a variety of great voices. In many ways the work I did in graduate school was a clunky attempt to cultivate what Eliot calls “the historical sense,” an awareness of tradition that “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones” but with “the whole of the literature of Europe” and “the whole of the literature of his own country” in his mind as well.2 Tradition, to Eliot, was the deep well of Western literature. Studying the personal essay in school, tradition for me meant the work of the genre’s luminaries—Montaigne and Bacon, Hazlitt and Lamb, Woolf and Didion, Baldwin and White.
Original Publication Citation
""Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent: A Review of Mary Lythgoe Bradford's Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays."" Dialogue. 49.3 (Fall 2016): 181-184.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Franklin, Joey, "Mormon Tradition and the Individual Talent: A Review of Mary Lythgoe Bradford's Mr. Mustard Plaster and Other Mormon Essays" (2016). Faculty Publications. 6730.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/6730
Document Type
Other
Publication Date
2016
Publisher
Dialogue
Language
English
College
Humanities
Department
English
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