“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 anyone 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.”
-T.S. Elliott
And here we are thinking about what T.S. Elliott has written. Even in a straightforward piece of writing he is able to elicit waves of stimulation for your mind. Is the above literature? I think so if you follow Eagleton’s thoughts on putting together abstract words to create stimulation. And Elliott certainly does so in this plea for writers to write with awareness.
“…the pastness of the past” is a string of abstractions that stimulates me. Just thinking about the word “pastness” has me interested in what Elliott is saying. Writers must be aware that the past is in the past, but despite being gone the past maintains its presence in all of our lives. How else do we learn? How else can we create? Every nanosecond that ticks by had left me something to learn from. A writer has to be willing to embrace the long gone ideas of past writers and make new ideas from those. A writer must be able to carry on the feeling of literature being literature, otherwise what he has written is no different than the TV Guide or a label on a Tide bottle.
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