People who write about tradition come from all directions, often blind to each other. They also rarely see themselves writing as part of a tradition in the broadest sense, which they obviously are. Tradition, strictly as a word, is fairly neutral, as it only means what is passed to us. T.S. Eliot noted in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that if people think of it at all, it is as a negative, with the innocent word often used as a stick to beat anyone who is not immediately anti, and for some kind of obeisance to the non-god of progress. My own favourite remark about the word is in Raymond Williams Keywords (1976), which is almost a throwaway at the end of the alphabetical entry: ‘the word moves again and again towards’ a negative, past-heavy view. ‘Considering only what has been handed down to us, and how various it actually is, this, in its own way, is both a betrayal and a surrender.’ Williams’s still unusually positive view reinforces an earlier point he makes about ‘the sense of tradition as active process’.

This sums up my own feeling about the topic, especially in relation to literature and to its related genres, folk and popular song. It also gives an indication of how wide I have cast my net over many years to find useful positive writings on tradition. These are sometimes both small and disparate positives, which are often not even at the centre of anyone’s work. Apart from Eliot and Williams, at present a chapter from the political sociologist Anthony Gidden’s Reith ...