Could someone help me understand "classic" literature

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Originally Posted by Leland Gaunt

Sorry Quark missed you in my initial response. My main grievance is that I do not need the books to think about the issue, and more often than not the books chosen are just going over old ground that no longer brings up a powerful response.

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Well, it's not quite so simple in the novel. It's not as though Edith Wharton just wrote on a page "think about marriage"--in which case, it would be superfluous. Instead, she wrote what's considered some of the most intelligent discourse on the subject and framed it in a larger narrative with dramatic situations. The idea is that you're seeing is how people talk about the issue and how it's conceived in a person's mind. Through reading the novel you begin to understand how others might view the issue and how they might talk about it. That's why I mentioned that it's helpful to read this if you're looking to be educated and articulate. Yeah, you can sit alone and think about marriage and what works for you, but that's not going to help you talk about the issue in a larger social context and understand where others are coming from. That's just one small thing to learn from the novel. I fixated on marriage and narrative in my post because the points I made are some of the most unequivical observations one can make about the book. Basic thematic and formal analysis are usually pretty safe. There's much more one could talk about, though: perspective, irony, gender, class, wealth, etc. The novel weaves quite a lot together. And, yeah, you could think about that all yourself, but I don't think you would get very far outside your own experiences with those topics.

I'm starting to think this is a all a bit of waste, though, as it seems like you're asking for something that's impossible to deliver in a post: the significance of several of the greatest literary figures. Usually, the answer to this question is gradually unfolded over the course of months in a class. There's no concise answer to why Wharton, Dante, or Shakespeare are great. I can tell you some things that frequently come up in discussion of these authors (in fact, I already did for Wharton), but no one has time to walk you through the marriage as it's presented in Wharton or philosophy as its presented in Dante. If you want to get specific about an author, work, or even a passage, maybe I can do some good. But this is going to go nowhere the way things are now.

Leland - why not start with the first canto and say why it doesn't work for you. Be specific!

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Originally Posted by Leland Gaunt

His love for literature, and his expression of it in the poem, in no way enhances the poem.
I could care less who influenced him, what matters is what he has written down.
I haven't read of numerous friendships. Why this one over the others?
I tend to avoid all three, why should I venture to somewhere that contains them? Also, is that an agreement that idealistic love is juvenile. because I don't see any other way to spin it.
I reiterate, this does not affect the actual content of the poem.
I was only upset with him in the beginning, and I made a complete *** out of myself. For which I apologized.
How wonderfully broad, you being just an atheist.

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Does not enhance the poem? His option for Virgil is not empty. Every aspect of the symbols (Virgil being one of them) used was calculated, it is part of the structure of the poem. Not to mention his farewell to Virgil, the knowledge that Virgil, as great as he is, could not achive Heaven... Not to mention the meeting in Limbo, and of course, the number of references that were necessary, you know, the define this style that was the union with classicism and medieval thinking (You just have the prime example of literature)... And by the war, read well: I gave you examples of themes who are not related to Catholicism, if his enhance (It does) or not the poem, is irrelevant. The matter is: The Comedy is way beyond just what would interest some catholic.
And if you do not really care about the matter of influence (and again, a theme so obvious) you will are ignoring one of (if not the) most important forces of creation in literature. You are just not reading.
Because the form its presented, because it is a friendship were we see two of the major poets, because itis a friendship that survived hell. And again, does not matter why, what matters is that you should consider that if you read the book and saw only what a catholic family would teach, then you read it very superficially.
You suggested to go to high school after idealistic love. Not me. And frankly, that was pedantic, the themes of humanity are present in the mediocre and in the sublime. You can find Shakespeare in high school, but you cannt find it how Shakespeare did. And this agreement was done by whom? I do not remember to have signed it. After all, what Dante and Beatrice have of juvenile? Or the medieval love we find in the knights ballads or in the story of Abelardo and Heloise? It would need some guy to create Romeo and Juliet and the romantic reading of it to link idealistic love to juvenile passions but it existed before and had nothing to do with Stephanie Mayer.
I would like to remember you that "what does not affect" the contect of the poem is your claim that you saw no philosophy there, no reason. Considering the main theme in Dante is philosophy and reason, the afirmation that it does not affect the contect of the poem is hilarious. It would be akim to removing Beatrice from the book...
Yeah, you know, when you have no faith, you do not need to be anything else. Much less agnostic, it is kind of a intelectual chimera... but hey, I can be a purple Atheist if we need teams for the World Cup.

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Well, it's not quite so simple in the novel. It's not as though Edith Wharton just wrote on a page "think about marriage"--in which case, it would be superfluous. Instead, she wrote what's considered some of the most intelligent discourse on the subject and framed it in a larger narrative with dramatic situations. The idea is that you're seeing is how people talk about the issue and how it's conceived in a person's mind. Through reading the novel you begin to understand how others might view the issue and how they might talk about it. That's why I mentioned that it's helpful to read this if you're looking to be educated and articulate. Yeah, you can sit alone and think about marriage and what works for you, but that's not going to help you talk about the issue in a larger social context and understand where others are coming from. That's just one small thing to learn from the novel. I fixated on marriage and narrative in my post because the points I made are some of the most unequivical observations one can make about the book. Basic thematic and formal analysis are usually pretty safe. There's much more one could talk about, though: perspective, irony, gender, class, wealth, etc. The novel weaves quite a lot together. And, yeah, you could think about that all yourself, but I don't think you would get very far outside your own experiences with those topics.

I'm starting to think this is a all a bit of waste, though, as it seems like you're asking for something that's impossible to deliver in a post: the significance of several of the greatest literary figures. Usually, the answer to this question is gradually unfolded over the course of months in a class. There's no concise answer to why Wharton, Dante, or Shakespeare are great. I can tell you some things that frequently come up in discussion of these authors (in fact, I already did for Wharton), but no one has time to walk you through the marriage as it's presented in Wharton or philosophy as its presented in Dante. If you want to get specific about an author, work, or even a passage, maybe I can do some good. But this is going to go nowhere the way things are now.

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Well that's just it, I do talk with other people about these things. And I believe that their opinions are more important than a character in a book. Otherwise I think that you are right. I have presented a hopelessly broad question, that would take a great deal of time for someone to answer. I just hope that one of the few English courses I take in college has some of the answers, and I still do plan on reading Dante at least one more time in my life.I thank those of you who did give me reasonable answers and pointed out the faults in what I was saying.

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Does not enhance the poem? His option for Virgil is not empty. Every aspect of the symbols (Virgil being one of them) used was calculated, it is part of the structure of the poem. Not to mention his farewell to Virgil, the knowledge that Virgil, as great as he is, could not achive Heaven... Not to mention the meeting in Limbo, and of course, the number of references that were necessary, you know, the define this style that was the union with classicism and medieval thinking (You just have the prime example of literature)... And by the war, read well: I gave you examples of themes who are not related to Catholicism, if his enhance (It does) or not the poem, is irrelevant. The matter is: The Comedy is way beyond just what would interest some catholic.
And if you do not really care about the matter of influence (and again, a theme so obvious) you will are ignoring one of (if not the) most important forces of creation in literature. You are just not reading.
Because the form its presented, because it is a friendship were we see two of the major poets, because itis a friendship that survived hell. And again, does not matter why, what matters is that you should consider that if you read the book and saw only what a catholic family would teach, then you read it very superficially.
You suggested to go to high school after idealistic love. Not me. And frankly, that was pedantic, the themes of humanity are present in the mediocre and in the sublime. You can find Shakespeare in high school, but you cannt find it how Shakespeare did. And this agreement was done by whom? I do not remember to have signed it. After all, what Dante and Beatrice have of juvenile? Or the medieval love we find in the knights ballads or in the story of Abelardo and Heloise? It would need some guy to create Romeo and Juliet and the romantic reading of it to link idealistic love to juvenile passions but it existed before and had nothing to do with Stephanie Mayer.
I would like to remember you that "what does not affect" the contect of the poem is your claim that you saw no philosophy there, no reason. Considering the main theme in Dante is philosophy and reason, the afirmation that it does not affect the contect of the poem is hilarious. It would be akim to removing Beatrice from the book...
Yeah, you know, when you have no faith, you do not need to be anything else. Much less agnostic, it is kind of a intelectual chimera... but hey, I can be a purple Atheist if we need teams for the World Cup.

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To me it was, I felt very little attachment to any of the characters. The environments they went throught were far more interesting than the people travelling through them. I had no clue that we were arguing if Dante was meant exclusively for Catholics, maybe that explains your use of unimportant themes. I care little for how the literature came into creation, I care just for what the literature is, and if the iterature is about what influenced it then it is most probably tedious and boring. I did not enjoy the form in which it was presented, them being poets does not affect the strength of their friendship, and hell is something the best of friends usually goes through figuratively, they only stand out in that they went through literally. Not even high school, younger I am talking 11-13 age group. The idealistic love, is the juvenile part. Couldn't say abot the knight as I have not read of him, but if the story is about idealistic love then I will likely pass. Lol, are you suggesting I read Twilight. When I said that it did not affect the content, I was referring to how it changed literature after it. Any philosophy and reason employed within the book would change the content. So you claim that they exist show me a passage where there is reasoning. It is not about teams, calling yourself atheist is unacceptable for the same reasons that calling yourself a theist is unacceptable. The terms I listed before are expansions upon the terms atheist and theist, and if you choose not to use them that just tells me you are either scared to reveal your true feelings upon the subject or that you have not thought about the subject enough. Also, it seems that you have been misinformed as to what the term agnostic means. You should know that you cannot be agnostic, just by itself, it needs supporting terms to fully explain your actual beliefs (or lack thereof). But this is neither here nor there. If you would like to continue this discussion just PM me, but let us not hijack this thread (even though it seems to be coming to a close).

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Originally Posted by Leland Gaunt

I have never once said that Dante sucks, that my teachers were dry, or that I think I am better than the various esteemed people you mentioned. You are too intelligent to fall into the strawman fallacy. I am sorry but the fact that many respectable people view the material in a positive light, is not enough for me. But it was enough for me to question my initial judgement, and I came here to understand it better. I was received with plenty of good advice like persist and grow as a person, I vowed to do both and to also study poetry more in an attempt to increase my chances of reaching understand. But I have also received vague praises of the poem. Please do show me examples of logic, deeper meaning, passages of particular beauty etc... The thought that I missed something on my first read excites me, almost as much of learning more philosophy. It is to these insufficient anwers that I post my criticisms, that were answered with bunk. I truly do want to improve my understanding of literature.

Though everything about my teachers has been true, I appreciate you reserving judgement. I am sorry if it seems as if I have been berating my teachers, what usually happens is after an essay I will add an extra paragraph where I express my opinion of the book. To which they give an enthusiastic but unsatisfactory response. So I thought it over, and decided that it was a combination of factors. Which is why I used an OP that allowed for all three, and I have received answers that only validate my initial opinion. I have found that this is the best way for me to form a reasonable opinion, that is to discuss topics with knowledgable individuals who have differing opinions. I am able to decide what arguments are valid through how they are refuted, and up to this point most of the answers I have been given supporting the book have not been convincing. I have on multiple occasions stated my intention to utilize the ones that were. With symbols my main problem is I find most of them to be unnecessary. For example while reading Ethan Frome, we were told that the cat represents Zeena's presence between Mattie and Ethan when they are alone. Unneeded, the fact that Zeena would continue to separate the two, even when not actually present, is obvious. So the cat is just a cat, and the ten minutes spent discussing the cat have been a waste. I have only completely rejected one work, and that is The Scarlet Letter. The rest I have just been deterred from.

Actually, the burden of proof is on you. It is impossible to prove that something does not exist, it is up to you fellows to prove that the something does indeed exist.

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Leland--I will start with your last point first, which I think brings us to the heart of the matter. You have misunderstood my suggestion and my position entirely. I am not interested in you proving or disproving anything, and thinking in terms of having something to prove is an unhelpful way to approach the study of literature. Of course it is going to be easier to state that a book is just %@$# dull, as someone did in a post above than it is to discuss in depth the multiple layers and nuances of a complex work of literature. Talking at this broad level in terms of a debate is not going to get anyone anywhere. The approach to take is one of an explorer, looking carefully at the text and working out what you like and don't like, what is interesting and what frustrates you, thinking over why you have those responses, what the author is doing and so on.

By asking you to post a passage and your position on it I was not challenging you. I was giving you the same respect and expectations that I have for my university students and for my scholarly colleagues. If either my students or a scholarly acquaintance is having trouble with a passage from Shakespeare, say, and wants my help with it, that person will come prepared to give me an example of where they are having problems with the play or poem and to give me their position on the passage in terms of what they do understand, where they are confused, what specifically they don't like or what they do etc. I don't care if you start out by talking about everything you hate in a particular passage, but you have to start out by saying something that will give me a clue as to what your exact opinions are, what you do and don't seem to be getting about what you are reading and what it is you are having problems with, or I won't know where you are or how to help you learn. As Quark said above, teaching someone how to read and understand complex literary works is not something that is going to happen by magic in one post, but usually takes an extended amount of time in a class to really begin to develop. It's a lot of work for the person doing the teaching. To be perfectly frank, I am a very busy professional scholar and teacher with plenty of students who are eager to learn from and communicate with me, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend hours stabbing in the dark trying to figure out what your exact issues are and what will make you interested in literature.

I believe that you do have a genuine interest in learning, but I think, again, that you have expectations that someone is going to deliver all of this to you (or at least you're coming across like someone who does), when there really is some burden on you, not to prove or disprove anything, but to get down to the specifics and explain your position on something so that myself and others on this thread can discuss literature with you. Tell you what, since I can see you're frustrated and you did ask for passages to understand better, I'll meet you part way. I think it's best to discuss a work in English to start, since dealing with issues of translation can be a problem, especially for poetry and especially for someone who hasn't had a lot of experience exploring poetry, as you say you haven't. What Shakespeare have you already read? Either select a passage from what you've read or give me the titles of the plays or poems and I'll pick out a passage from that work for you to respond to so that we can get a real discussion going on this thread. Sound like a plan?

Petrarch- See my post above for an answer to most of your post. I no longer expect you to explain why Dante is a triumph in literature. I realize that this is an unfair task to ask of someone. In regards to me posting passages that I did not like, this would be terribly hard. It's not that I hated anything in particular, the poem simply did not move me and I saw nothing resembling some of the claims that others have said were in the book (philosophy, reason). I was a very gray and uninteresting read.
As to discussing another work, I'd be glad to. Unfortunately I do not have any copies of Shakespeare on me, but let me see what I have in my bookbag at the moment. I will repost in just a minute.

Edit: Damn, I only have Steinbeck, Twain, and Tolstoy laying around the house. I liked all three, well except of course Tolstoy's concept of history, unless of course you can defend this. I'm sorry to have things fizzle out like this, but I will attempt to get my hands on The Scarlet Letter as soon as possible.

Hi Leland--The complete works of Shakespeare and of many other authors are all available here on this site. :)

Haha, I should really learn to utilize my resources.

Edit: I will look through the Scarlet Letter after I return from work around 8, and will post after that.

Leland,

If we can put aside the issues of personal taste, since we all have those, one might ask the question, which you seem to be asking, is, what is the use of aesthetic appreciation? It does not make us better people. Hitler had something of an aesthetic education, and yet he wanted to cleanse the world pure for his view of Germanic genotypes being the only right kind of humanity. Scratch that.

So what does it do then, to be able to appreciate Dante as the supreme poet, or to see that Shakespeare paved the way to reflect humanity back upon us, or that Mozart enabled music to express passions with so many variations that it still speaks to the trained ear?

My answer is that it enables perception of our achievements and our nature, and some of us base how we live our lives on it, though most of us won't. I don't know what engenders your enthusiasm. Hockey? Video games--whatever-- your aesthetic choices are still involved with what you care about. Maybe the *literary* is bunk, and that is fine, but as Petrarch is perhaps attempting to convey, maybe you should not be so impatient to limit your horizons at this point in your life.

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Originally Posted by Leland Gaunt

To me it was, I felt very little attachment to any of the characters. The environments they went throught were far more interesting than the people travelling through them. I had no clue that we were arguing if Dante was meant exclusively for Catholics, maybe that explains your use of unimportant themes.

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You consider some of the main themes as unimportant and is focused on the catholic aspects of Dante. It is like someone refusing to read Homer because you did not believe in Zeus. Those themes I listed are among the most relevant themes and frankly, if you argued there is little it could add to your catholic education, there "importance" of the theme is of little relevance to dismiss your argument.

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I care little for how the literature came into creation, I care just for what the literature is, and if the iterature is about what influenced it then it is most probably tedious and boring.

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Most of it and of course, it is not boring.

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I did not enjoy the form in which it was presented, them being poets does not affect the strength of their friendship, and hell is something the best of friends usually goes through figuratively, they only stand out in that they went through literally.

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As it was said, you lack the experience to deal with this kind of text (which should give you the hint that reading manifests outside the text) and this affects your enjoyment. However, you are already full of certains and judgements that someone without such experience should have dropped off.

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Not even high school, younger I am talking 11-13 age group. The idealistic love, is the juvenile part. Couldn't say abot the knight as I have not read of him, but if the story is about idealistic love then I will likely pass. Lol, are you suggesting I read Twilight.

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Its you who used high school (In my country this therminology does not even exists) but again, you talk about an agreement that does not exists, only reflects the lack of information about literature and do resemble a twilight version.

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When I said that it did not affect the content, I was referring to how it changed literature after it. Any philosophy and reason employed within the book would change the content. So you claim that they exist show me a passage where there is reasoning.

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Tsc. The book is about philosophy and reason, Beatrice affects the content, its a prime example of humanism, if you want more just read something like Il Convivio.

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It is not about teams, calling yourself atheist is unacceptable for the same reasons that calling yourself a theist is unacceptable. The terms I listed before are expansions upon the terms atheist and theist, and if you choose not to use them that just tells me you are either scared to reveal your true feelings upon the subject or that you have not thought about the subject enough. Also, it seems that you have been misinformed as to what the term agnostic means. You should know that you cannot be agnostic, just by itself, it needs supporting terms to fully explain your actual beliefs (or lack thereof). But this is neither here nor there. If you would like to continue this discussion just PM me, but let us not hijack this thread (even though it seems to be coming to a close).

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No need to continue this, someone who believes in no deity cannt be also someone which consider such belief (or in the existence) a possibility. I do not need to discuss this.

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My answer is that it enables perception of our achievements and our nature, and some of us base how we live our lives on it, though most of us won't. I don't know what engenders your enthusiasm. Hockey? Video games--whatever-- your aesthetic choices are still involved with what you care about. Maybe the *literary* is bunk, and that is fine, but as Petrarch is perhaps attempting to convey, maybe you should not be so impatient to limit your horizons at this point in your life.

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I understand what you are saying, except on the point of my impatience. I don't believe I'm trying to limit horizons, in fact anything but that. I have been tying to broaden my horizons for the entire year and have discovered many things that I love, like backpacking (the most intensely emotional experience I have ever had). I think of it less as limiting myself and more as a way to focus my interests, and I also think that we all "limit" ourselves and much of it is probably done while still young. So, no, I don't think that I do appreciate literary aesthetics, all that much, or maybe it's just with works like Dante. I suppose I'll find out as I continue reading. Thank you for your post, it was the most illuminating response to why people love these books so much.

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You consider some of the main themes as unimportant and is focused on the catholic aspects of Dante. It is like someone refusing to read Homer because you did not believe in Zeus. Those themes I listed are among the most relevant themes and frankly, if you argued there is little it could add to your catholic education, there "importance" of the theme is of little relevance to dismiss your argument.
Most of it and of course, it is not boring.
As it was said, you lack the experience to deal with this kind of text (which should give you the hint that reading manifests outside the text) and this affects your enjoyment. However, you are already full of certains and judgements that someone without such experience should have dropped off.
Its you who used high school (In my country this therminology does not even exists) but again, you talk about an agreement that does not exists, only reflects the lack of information about literature and do resemble a twilight version
Tsc. The book is about philosophy and reason, Beatrice affects the content, its a prime example of humanism, if you want more just read something like Il Convivio.
No need to continue this, someone who believes in no deity cannt be also someone which consider such belief (or in the existence) a possibility. I do not need to discuss this.

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They really are quite irrelevant.
It really was boring.
My experience with the type of texts is only part of the answer. And you have an extremely unrealistic idea of what it means and what it should mean to be young.
What agreement?
Finally! Thats an answer to one of my questions, even though humanistic thought is one of my least favorite.
Ah, it is as I thought you have no clue what agnostic means. It means you lack knowledge of God/ don't believe that the knowledge exists. So an agnostic atheist is one who claims no knowledge of God and does not believe in God. You can also be an agnostic theist. Answer me just one question, do you not believe in God, or do you believe God doesn't exist. The difference is enormous.

Leland,

Here is a bit of a shocker: I am not an expert on Dante, and the only parts of The Divine Comedy I know well are the opening cantos of The Inferno, but I know enough about the history of Italy, and the Italian Renaissance, to know how revoluntionary his work was, and why, even if all those footnotes on his enemies can exasperate--and it was only after school that one of my goals is to understand him in his own language to the best of my ability (I am Italian and while not fluent the tongue comes easy to me.)

Petrarch and luke have the better training to defend him than I do, as I could not advance fully afield to teach, but with Dante one better understands the arc of Italian influences, through English literature and beyond.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; it is an old saying as cliched as the hills, but contains a basic truth. Dante himself was vicious and unpleasant; he is rumored to have beat a man for reciting tersa rima inaccurately, but without Dante the whole of our western heritage, the best of it, collapses--and it takes study to grasp these issues, regardless of any one instructor's talent, or lack thereof, to offer it.

If you reject this, that is your choice, and I am certainly not going to offer you an apologia for it, but will not condemn it either.

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Leland,

Here is a bit of a shocker: I am not an expert on Dante, and the only parts of The Divine Comedy I know well are the opening cantos of The Inferno, but I know enough about the history of Italy, and the Italian Renaissance, to know how revoluntionary his work was, and why, even if all those footnotes on his enemies can exasperate--and it was only after school that one of my goals is to understand him in his own language to the best of my ability (I am Italian and while not fluent the tongue comes easy to me.)

Petrarch and luke have the better training to defend him than I do, as I could not advance fully afield to teach, but with Dante one better understands the arc of Italian influences, through English literature and beyond.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; it is an old saying as cliched as the hills, but contains a basic truth. Dante himself was vicious and unpleasant; he is rumored to have beat a man for reciting tersa rima inaccurately, but without Dante the whole of our western heritage, the best of it, collapses--and it takes study to grasp these issues, regardless of any one instructor's talent, or lack thereof, to offer it.

If you reject this, that is your choice, and I am certainly not going to offer you an apologia for it, but will not condemn it either

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Though I do not understand what this has to do with my response to your post, I will still bite. However revolutionary it is, it still does not make it a good piece of work. Das Kapital was revolutionary, but most mock it, and rightly so. I do not care about Italian influences in English literature, I care about each individual work by itself, and judge it as an individual work. I do reject that, it is a ridiculous assertation. The best of western heritage, all comes from one man. What utter bollocks. Don't try to paint the West as a monolithic entity.

Given that response, I will follow in Quark's wake, and cede the field. If you despise it all then what are you looking for here?

As Quark knows, I find the work of Dickens hard to love, and yet as Petrarch does with Faulkner, I make the effort to still read the novelist and appreciate what he was in the Victorian era without damning him--it resides in my love of scholarship for its own sake, which, as I've indicated, isn't for everyone. Since you love backpacking, maybe you should check out Stegner; his work deals with demythologizing the western frontier.

Actually, the burden of proof is on you. It is impossible to prove that something does not exist, it is up to you fellows to prove that the something does indeed exist.

Actually, in a dispute such as this... when one person with limited experience in the field is challenging the accepted judgment of the larger portion of experts in the field (academics, writers, and common readers in Virginia Woolf's sense of the term) the basis of proof is upon the person who is challenging the accepted values. Beside which, quite frankly Dante has no need forme or anyone else to defend him. His position in the canon of classic literature is quite secure regardless of the complaints of any number of high-school and college literature students.

Though I do not understand what this has to do with my response to your post, I will still bite. However revolutionary it is, it still does not make it a good piece of work. Das Kapital was revolutionary, but most mock it, and rightly so. I do not care about Italian influences in English literature, I care about each individual work by itself, and judge it as an individual work. I do reject that, it is a ridiculous assertation. The best of western heritage, all comes from one man. What utter bollocks. Don't try to paint the West as a monolithic entity.

The utter bollocks is the sophomoric notion that any work of art exists in a vacuum or that its merits are solely measured on an individual basis. How is that even possible? To offer up a judgment of any individual work there must be some concept of what the standards for "good" and "bad" are. How are these standards developed if not in comparison. T.S. Eliot in his seminal essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent offered a view of the relationship of the writer to tradition and the influence of earlier writers:

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; 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 a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

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. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; 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 order 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, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

A work of art attains the status of a literary classic because of its impact upon (and the opinions of) subsequent writers, readers, critics, and other literary experts or academics. Your analogy with Das Kapital is completely misleading because Das Kapital has never been accepted as a major literary creation. Its influence was political, not literary. One might just as well suggest that Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica are major works of literature because of their influence on the sciences.

The Comedia has attained a preeminent level of esteem as a work of literature among critics, literary academics, writers, and readers and yet you would argue that the work is grossly flawed or fails to meet certain standards based upon what? Your own personal opinion? We have all granted you that. No one can be made to like something. It is doubtful that they can even be convinced by logic into liking something. But you are not simply stating that you personally dislike the work... rather you are suggesting a range of flaws that suggest the fault is in Dante... and again this criticism is based upon what? Your own deep reading of literature?:frown2: