Sean Lucy, Poetics and T.S. Eliot's Idea of Tradition
The Writer. If he (or she) is to have any significance he (or she) should have readers, and, though the serious writer can now only write for those who, almost by chance, can understand, he (or she) always hopes for a larger audience and even hopes to become p o p u l a r (although he (or she) does not usually write with that specific purpose).
This problem of communication: Without the discipline without the basis of a common tradition this struggle for meaning becomes something like an impossibility, and the literary world is inclined to break up into isolated individuals or into small groups with artistic methods which are almost like private codes. When this happens, writers obviously lose almost all social significance. And (since almost all activites require such a significance) it means that they lose almost all their justification for writing