The ‘Period Talent’ of G. K. Chesterton

Abstract

A very strange thing happens when a writer dies. The strange thing is that his books tend to die with him. A month after his death his name is not mentioned again, for he is no longer in competition with the living, and twenty or more years will pass before criticism decides to take another look at him and his work and try to discover if there was a real person there, or only a living gramophone record engraved and wound up by his period. Shakespeare’s poetry was dead for nearly two hundred years, and then, and only as by chance, it came to life again. This fact alone is a truly remarkable criticism on the generations that succeeded the Elizabethan Age.