In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree
to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the
manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.
It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those
aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and
pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most
enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we
shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his
work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously,” he continued.
I mention this because in his new book on art, “Keeping an Eye Open,” Julian Barns says much the same thing, but in a
fashion that is perhaps easier to understand and make use of.
“In all the arts, there are usually two things going on at
the same time: the desire to make it new, and a continuing conversation with
the past. All the great innovators look
to previous innovators, to the ones who gave them permission to go and do
otherwise," Barnes said, adding that in art, "painted homages to predecessors are a frequent trope.”
In the paragraph from which that quote is taken, Barnes is
writing about both literature and painting. “If the first great Modernist novel
was “Ulysses,” how come its best sections were the most realistic, the ones
that most truly render ordinary life?” he asked.
It’s a good point. Only by incorporating the familiar can
one make what is new truly relevant, one might argue.
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