T.S. Elliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and Alain Locke's "The New Negro Although many of the authors that we have studied this semester saw fit to express what they considered the Modern artist's relationship to tradition should be, two authors stand out because they explicitly say what they felt it was. These two authors Are T.S. Elliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent", and Alain Locke in "The New Negro". Elliot and Locke use different definitions of the word "tradition" and address a different group of people in their particular works. Elliot uses the word tradition to sp