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What forms can or should I give to my work?
T. S. Eliot: In a pursuit of form
Page 2
Sophistry Three sophists came to greet the Consul, who addressed them with all courtesy, and seated them beside him. But then he jokingly advised them to take care: "Renown breeds envy. Rivals are writing. You have enemies." One of the trio answered seriously:
"Our present enemies will never harm us. It's later that our enemies will come, new sophists when we're senile, pitiful, and some of us have entered Hades. Then our present words and deeds will seem grotesque (perhaps amusing), for our enemies will change sophistic style and trends. Such as I and such as they are similar, transforming what is past. Whatever we've described as beautiful and right they'll show to be superfluous and silly, and will effortlessly say the same things differently. Just as we repeated old words in a different way."
Cavafy, Enemies (1900)
But it is now very questionable whether there are more than two or three in the present generation who are capable, the least bit capable, of benefiting by such advantages were they given. At most two or three actually devote themselves to this pursuit of form for which they have little or no public recognition. To create a form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme, or rhythm. It is also the realization of the whole appropriate content of this rhyme or rhythm. The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such a pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling. The framework which was provided for the Elizabethan dramatist was not merely blank verse and the five act play and the Elizabethan playhouse; it was not merely the plot -- for the poets incorporated, re-modelled, adapted, or invented as occasion suggested. It was also the half-formed , the "temper of the age" (an unsatisfactory phrase), a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public, to respond to particular stimuli.
There is a book to be written on the common-places of any great dramatic period, the handling of Fate or Death, the recurrence of mood, tone, situation. We should see then just how little each poet had to do; only so much as would make a play his, only what was really essential to make it different from any one's else. When there is this economy of effort it is possible to have several, even many, good poets at once. The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours; but less talent was wasted.
First Page ||| Next PageCf. 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
