Context of Production
(For the purpose of these postings I will use poems as examples)
It is obvious that certain poems or novels could not have been written at a different time. This is clear in the case of subject matter that points to a particular event. The poem could not have been written before the event. There are thousands of examples of this. Consider Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916.’
Poems also fit into their particular time because of the style in which they were written. Look at the two excerpts below, taken from poems written two hundred years apart:
Never seek to tell thy love
It is obvious that certain poems or novels could not have been written at a different time. This is clear in the case of subject matter that points to a particular event. The poem could not have been written before the event. There are thousands of examples of this. Consider Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916.’
Poems also fit into their particular time because of the style in which they were written. Look at the two excerpts below, taken from poems written two hundred years apart:
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently invisibly.
(William Blake – 1793)
About ten days or so
After we saw you dead
You came back in a dream.
I’m all right now you said.
(Thom Gunn ‘Reassurance’ – 1992)
If the dates of these poems were swapped around they would not ‘work.’ Gunn’s poem would probably not have been considered poetry in 1793 and Blake’s poems would seem overly-poetical in 1993. Which aspects of the poems’ language places them firmly in their time?
For a poem to ‘work,’ it must seem to fit in with what has gone before it. In his well-known essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (written in 1922), T. S. Eliot says this, although in a much more elaborate way.
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
Eliot’s ‘the dead’ is simply all the important poems that were written in the past, which determine how a new poem is written and how we interpret a new poem. Poets have to work within the bounds of what is accepted as poetry in their own time. Where these bounds lie is different for each generation.
After we saw you dead
You came back in a dream.
I’m all right now you said.
(Thom Gunn ‘Reassurance’ – 1992)
If the dates of these poems were swapped around they would not ‘work.’ Gunn’s poem would probably not have been considered poetry in 1793 and Blake’s poems would seem overly-poetical in 1993. Which aspects of the poems’ language places them firmly in their time?
For a poem to ‘work,’ it must seem to fit in with what has gone before it. In his well-known essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (written in 1922), T. S. Eliot says this, although in a much more elaborate way.
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
Eliot’s ‘the dead’ is simply all the important poems that were written in the past, which determine how a new poem is written and how we interpret a new poem. Poets have to work within the bounds of what is accepted as poetry in their own time. Where these bounds lie is different for each generation.
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