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What forms can or should I give to my work?
T. S. Eliot: In a pursuit of form
From T. S. Eliot, "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama", The Dial, November 1920
The Elizabethan age in England was able to absorb a great quantity of new thoughts and new images, almost dispensing with tradition, because it had this great form of its own which imposed itself on everything that came to it. Consequently, the blank verse of its plays accomplished a subtlety and consciousness, even an intellectual power, that no blank verse has developed or even repeated; elsewhere this Age is crude, pedantic, or loutish in comparison with its contemporary France or Italy. The nineteenth century had a good many fresh impressions too; but it had no form in which to confine them. Browning and perhaps Wordsworth hammered out forms for themselves -- personal forms, The Excursion, Sordello, The Ring and the Book, Dramatic Monologues; but no man can invent a form, create a taste for it, and perfect it too. Tennyson, who might unquestionably have been a consummate master of minor forms, took to turning out large patterns on a machine. As for Keats and Shelley, they were too young to be judged, and they were trying one form after another.
These poets were certainly obliged to consume energy in a pursuit of form which could never lead to a wholly satisfying result. There has only been one Dante; and after all Dante had the benefit of years of practice in forms employed and altered by numbers of contemporaries and predecessors; he did not waste the years of youth in metric invention; and when he came to the Commedia he knew how to pillage right and left. To have, given into one's hands, a crude form, capable of indefinite refinement, and to be the person to see the possibilities -- Shakespeare was very fortunate. And it is perhaps the craving for some such donnée which draws us on toward the present mirage of poetic drama.
Cf. Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom | Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
