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Of course! It reminds me of Alexander Pope: True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. The compliment to Carrol was only meant to appease an angry god :) Cheers! ~ CR Diana Manister <[log in to unmask]> wrote: CR - I stressed the similarity of poetic and athletic "peak" moments advisedly. More than one runner I know has described the feeling of winning a race as if effortlessly, almost knowing in advance they would win, making it sound as if there might be a muse for athletes as well as for artists! Practicing so as to be ready when the muse visits seems to be advisable in both fields of endeavor. Diana From: cr mittal Reply-To: "T. S. Eliot Discussion forum." To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Stream of Consciousness Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:08:25 -0800 You have a point there, Diana. And so had Carrol, the know-all grand old teacher. O, I was only fending with him trying to, as you put it, keep my hand in -- an unequal fight :)) Cheers! ~ CR Diana Manister wrote: Eliot's practice of writing poetry just to keep his hand in, or what a jazz musician would call his or her "chops," seems to be not very unlike runners practicing for the Boston marathon. Diana Carrol Cox wrote: Asking "what went into (its) preparation" treats writing as though it were the Boston Marathon. By "what went went into its preparation" I simply meant that the poet must equip himself for the task. What I had in mind was the following passage from Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent': "I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career." Of course, one also assumes in the poet what constitutes an essential part of his poetic equipment. To quote from Rukeyser's 'The Life of Poetry': "The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice -- even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved -- that the questions raised are very pertinent. . . . The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem. These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes -- for the moment -- an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form." Of course, there's much more to it than just this :) Regards. ~ CR --------------------------------- Access over 1 million songs - Yahoo! Music Unlimited. _________________________________________________________________ Get the latest Windows Live Messenger 8.1 Beta version. Join now. http://ideas.live.com --------------------------------- Want to start your own business? Learn how on Yahoo! Small Business. _________________________________________________________________ All-in-one security and maintenance for your PC. Get a free 90-day trial! http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwlo0050000002msn/direct/01/?href=http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwlo0050000001msn/direct/01/?href=http://www.windowsonecare.com/?sc_cid=msn_hotmail --------------------------------- Cheap Talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates.