Tradition & the Individual Talent

sus

sus

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Who will read with me and discuss?

Erik McLuhan has called this essay a greater contribution to humanity than Einstein's general relativity. Papa Marshall was heavily influenced, discussing it with Lewis and Pound.

Link.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
corpsey and craner had to read it for university they'll have loads of interesting things to say about it just you wait
 
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Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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It's a great essay, read it ages ago but I should revisit it. Funnily enough was thinking about it the other day in relation to something Thomas Hardy said: "There is no new poetry; but if the new poet - if he carry the flame on further (and if not he is no new poet) - comes with a new note. And that new note it is that troubles the critical waters."

Hardy was of course a big Greek/Latin scholar, his poetry was both innovative and traditional, and he was an influence on Pound, so quite relevant to modernism I suppose.
 
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sus

sus

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luka said:
corpsey and craner had to read it for university they'll have loads of interesting things to say about it just you wait
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"If a poet is to last beyond the age of 25 he must be interested in history"
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I can't remember it all that well, but skimming it I remember that what I found most interesting about it was the stuff about impersonality, which chimed with remarks made or written by Flaubert and Joyce about the artist disappearing into the creation

"What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

I had a (very) vague idea for a PhD about literature and impersonality, linking it perhaps to the transcendence of self offered (allegedly) by meditation and psychedelics, and I would have certainly cited Eliot on this stuff...

My scant experience of drawing/painting and music production makes me think that the artist in the process of creation, while drawing on their personality and having some sort of creative parameters defined by it, doesn't necessarily consciously express it and IS caught up in and constrained by a medium that is outside of them, bigger than them, and that this is a good thing

Yeats another figure I remember talking about this: "Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete."
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
None of this may be particularly relevant to Eliot's argument about the poet needing to be versed in tradition

But that's what I found most interesting about it

Having long had a keen sense of the self being the source of much agony, and happiness to be found in the transcended of self in company, drugs, music etc.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

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The bit I remember and most stuck with me is the idea of each new work of art altering the order of everything that came before it, and how we read it. I suppose that was the most insightful bit of it and must have got up other critics' noses who thought their Shakespeares and Dantes or whoever to be set in stone.
 
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sus

sus

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It is interesting because most contemporary literature is about the performance of persona.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Benny B said:
The bit I remember and most stuck with me is the idea of each new work of art altering the order of everything that came before it, and how we read it. I suppose that was the most insightful bit of it and must have got up other critics' noses who thought their Shakespeares and Dantes or whoever to be set in stone.
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every avant-garde reorganizes the canon retroactively in order to lend itself a telos of inevitability
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
General relativity is actually pretty rad though, you should all give it a whirl some time.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
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 soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; 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.
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sus

sus

Moderator
McLuhan:
The arts from Homer to the present day indeed form an ideal order, as Mr. Eliot has said, because they have been representations of the spiritual quests of the pagan rebirth rituals. ‘Rebirth’ in pagan ritual amounts to retracing the stages of descent of the soul in the hell of matter and chaos which is existence. As such, the pagan rituals are in reality representations of the process of abstraction, or the stages of human apprehension. From this point of view, may not the pagan rituals be valid as art and metaphysics in spite of their own assumptions, but impotent as religion? James Joyce seems to have been the first to grasp all of these relationships.
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sus

sus

Moderator
McLuhan's occult origins and his opposition to gnostic-manichean worldviews and the influence of his thinking on Kenner (itself derived fr Eliot in part) is an important network history of modernism, zero question, only a philistine and illiterate could think otherwise
 
sus

sus

Moderator
@craner buy this for me to repent

Spectrum Volume I, Number 1 Winter 1957 by BELL, James (editor) Richard Eberhart, William Carlos Williams, Donald Davie et al.: (1957) | Jeff Hirsch Books, ABAA

1st Edition - Soft cover - Spectrum / Santa Barbara College, Santa Barbara, CA - 1957 - First edition. Softcover. 61 pages. Includes contributions by Hugh Kenner, Charles Tomlinson, Edgar Bogardus, Kent Chapman, Jane Silver, Jackie Newby, Cyril Epstein, Earl McGrath, Richard Eberhart, Richard K...
www.abebooks.com
 
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