Date Posted:04:38:09 04/27/08 Sun Author: Shannon Subject: Re: Rejection of Imitation in Music In reply to:
Jfish
's message, "Re: Rejection of Imitation in Music" on 19:03:04 04/23/08 Wed
T.S.Eliot presents an interesting position on this question of tradition and art in one of his literary criticism essays, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Countering the emphasis on individualism and the false idea of originality in art, Eliot states:
"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 historic snese....and the historic involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historic sense compels a man to write not merely with his own gerneation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within the whole literature of his country has a simlutaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historic sense, which is a sense of timelessness, as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer more acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaniety."
Thus, Eliot seems to see it as necessary for true art that the artist consider his past, as well as his present, as viable models.
