Day Three

Except for the essay, I did my reading late last night.

I actually read two essays earlier in the day. One was T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," from 1919. The other was Cynthia Ozick's "A Drugstore in Winter" from 1982. They make for interesting comparison. Eliot argues against individuality. And given what he means by it, he may be right. The poet must learn from tradition so that he doesn't sound like everyone else in his own age. Tradition will free him from faddishness. So far, so good. But there was also an idea of being a laboratory for emotion even while not having the emotion decide what went into the writing that I found cold. Cynthia Ozick's piece was quite different. She wrote autobiography of a kind where she knew that the nitty gritty details of place and time were likely to hit a resonating frequency in others from other very different places and times. I think she showed the good side of individuality. Yet I also knew that the first sense of Eliot's tradition might have taught her how to do this well. In any case, I think Eliot is more right than wrong, but I think the recent discussion on reason and emotion carried on by someone like Antonio D'Amasio would show where Eliot fell short.

My short story was by Roald Dahl, and my poem by William Drummond of Hawthorndon. Both of these were worth reading, but I don't feel like writing about them now. Anything worth saying about them will take some development. It may well be worth it, but I can't quickly jot worthwhile notes on those.