addendum: about poets and purification

I struggled to explain my interpretation of what Eliot felt about a poet’s role being the “purification” of the dialect of the tribe and how this applies to the evolution of visual culture this morning, so I wanted to take a second to try and explain it a little better here…

While the role of “purification” does not necessarily fall to poets alone—since writers of prose can be just as deliberate in their choice of word and sentence structure—the process of making those choices is all the more transparent in poetry  because, generally speaking, there are altogether fewer words in a completed piece of poetry than in prose and because both the author and the audience are likely to be familiar with the traditional poetic structures available to the poet and the level of adherence/caprice being used in following or diverting from those structures.  Over the course of the Four Quartets, Eliot slips into and out of various structures and deliberately quotes (or “appropriates”) past masters/masterworks, altering and juxtaposing them at his own discretion.  It is the level of care that he takes in employing his poetic tools that allow him to show concern for the “dialect of the tribe.”  He elaborates on the process at another point in the Quartets:

“…every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)…”

Eliot always took great care to acknowledge the literary shoulders on which he stood (he wrote a very famous essay, Tradition and Individual Talent, about the relationship between the canon and its contemporary workers), so he saw this “purification” as a slowly evolving and deliberate process in which the self-aware poet did their best to chart a position in the course of literary affairs and choose the right words for their particular time and purpose.

Now, here’s how I see this applying to visual culture…   Because of the way that technology and culture evolved, Eliot was in a better position to choose deliberately and understand his place at the end of that long chain than anyone working in the century preceding his own.  The printing press had been in action since the 15^th century but the early 20^th century was probably the golden age of the printed word: newspapers wielded tremendous power, public libraries were ubiquitous, television was just a twinkling in some techie’s eye, and even radio broadcasting didn’t really get started until the 1920s (Elliot published The Waste Land in 1922).  Written language, through its long course of evolution, had achieved a tremendous amount of agency.  The masses were, by and large, literate and contributing to the written collective.  This means that written culture had come a long, long way from the days when written culture was largely the domain of the lawmaking and priestly classes.

Which leads us to why this is a matter of “purification”…  Another 20^th century literary figure (and coincidentally, another St. Louis native—Eliot was born and raised there), William Burroughs, had a sort of sci-fi scenario/theory that language is a virus, that it arrived from the outer reaches of the universe and started to prey on human beings by taking control of their thoughts and actions.  I think that may be taking it a bit far, but there may be some truth in it too: if language evolved to serve a need and if that need was, for a long period of time, exploited to reflect the ends of an elite ruling class, then it is reasonable to expect language to contain some vestiges of its evolution as a tool of oppression.  At the very least, it probably took until the 20^th century for the majority of a population of a nation to be encouraged to make use of writing as a tool for deliberate and reflective action.  So, I believe that to “purify the dialect of the tribe” means to take a more perfect control of the tool of language—to do one’s part to wipe out the ostentatiousness, pedantry, and vulgarity—and to help everyone think just a little more keenly.

I believe that visual culture is now at or nearing the point at which Eliot encountered the written word.  We must try to help our students see the Photoshoped models, the smartly seductive product placements, the ideologies of perpetual consumption and unhappiness, etc.  clearly and we must try to help them see the alternatives clearly also.  Visual culture is becoming a collective.  As art educators we must help our students see the whole and plot their course.