Abstract
A corollary to this maxim might be: feeling the life of a single other existence or making felt, to another, one’s own single existence is a virtue unique to imaginative writing. ‘“Life”’ — as F. R. Leavis observes of Montale’s Xenia — ‘is a necessary word, but “life” is concretely “there” only in individual lives‘.2 What follows hereafter is a version of the attempt to understand ‘life’ through the written lives of three men: three writers whose imaginations struggled to express their own and others’ particularities. Understanding their words provokes a belief in the ideal of understanding their lives: understanding their lives justifies the attempt to understand their words — to do criticism. And this is simply the confirmation of the extraordinary illusion of language — somehow arbitrary sounds and signs are naturalized and the isolation of selves is transcended.
Il est plus aisé de connaiître l’homme en général que de connaître un homme en particulier.1
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Notes
La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et Autres Oeuvres Morales (Paris, 1949) CDXXXVI. p. 73.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Xenia’, in Eugenio Montale: New Poems (New York, 1976) p. XXVI.
Thomas Gray, ‘Sonnet: On the Death of Richard West’, The Poems of Gray and Collins (Oxford, 1937) p. 130.
Eugenio Montale, ‘I Travestimenti’, It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook (Quaderno di quattro anni) (New York, 1980) pp. 40–1.
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957) p. 89.
E. A. Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London, 1908) p. 366.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London, 1963) p. 79.
Philip Larkin, ‘Grub Village’, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London, 1983) p. 190.
Edward Thomas, ‘In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)’, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973; reprinted with corrections 1974) p. 130.
Thomas Hardy, ‘In Time of “The breaking of Nations”’, The Complete Poems (London. 1976) p. 543.
Quoted in Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy, A Biography (Oxford, reprinted with corrections, 1987) p. 516.
Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, On Individuality and Social Forms, Selected Writings (Chicago, 1971) p. 143.
See Lesley D. Harman, The Modern Stranger: On Language and Membership (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam, 1988) pp. 19–21 for a discussion of Robert E. Park’s ‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man’, American Journal of Sociology, 33 (8), pp. 881–93.
William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 19’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven and London) 1977, pp. 26–8.
T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume I 1898–1922 (London, 1988) p. 199.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Peregrine Books, 1962) p. 33.
For example, consider Professor Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (sic) (London, 1987). Professor Kenner, author of The Pound Era, has never even heard of Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, or J. R. Ackerley: or so it would appear from his book.
Philip Larkin, ‘High Windows’, Collected Poems (London, 1988) p. 165.
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© 1991 Piers Gray
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Gray, P. (1991). Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In: Marginal Men. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08137-0_1
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