be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great
labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense...
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 simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order...
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... what happens when a new work of art is created is
something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art
which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal monument
among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the
new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order
is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist
after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order
must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are
readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Whoever has approved this idea of order...will not find it
preposterous that the past should be altered by the present
as much as the present is directed by the past."
-T.S. Eliot
