Hello Clucky--There is a great quote somewhere in my files comparing CONVENTION with TRADITION. I can't lay my hands on it right now, but here is a good one from Eliot that talks about the same issue:

If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition,’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves in the first place, the historical sense...and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
—T. S. Eliot