Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his
own generation and 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.
(1093)
Within this tradition he also refers to the concept of an “order,” where writers would be
evaluated on how they “fit” in terms of their traceable influences both past and present
(1093). Not so surprisingly so, Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land precisely
embodies these theoretical criteria. Intrinsically indebted to the Western literary tradition
for its innumerable references to past canonical works, it also established what would
become the most influential poem of the Modernist tradition.
The nineteenth century also saw the defamation of literature’s most ancient
precept: the idea advocated by generations of writers and critics, from Horace to Arnold,
that literature should please as well as serve educational purposes by aspiring to the
highest standards of moral and social behavior. Friedrich Nietzsche particularly despised
the religious imperative that perceived the highest truth to be attainable solely in a state
of highest morality—which he called “la niaiserie religieuse par excellence” [“the
utmost religious foolishness” (translation mine)] (36)—claiming that “morality in Europe
at present is a herding-animal morality” (68). The phrase “art for art’s sake” was coined
by Walter Pater to conceptualize the tenets of aestheticism as first articulated by
Théophile Gautier in his Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. Championed by
successive legions of artists such as Charles Baudelaire in France and Oscar Wilde in
England, aestheticism offered an alternative slant on the use value of art. More
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