dilettantism - (in an attempt to reconcile the high brow)

in To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, in an essay (a lecture) titled "American Literature and Language," eliot makes an attempt not to define American Literature, but to name a few quintessentially American writers. he begins where any beginner might: the names Poe, Whitman, Twain. for whatever reason, eliot believes these three writers all have the trademark of a national literature. they have, he says bravely, pedantically, "strong local flavour combined with unconscious universality." what a nice formulation. of course, eliot quickly leaves these three - along with his nice formulation - in favor of explaining the even-better-group, the revolutionaries, who look to their past, to their "national literature," and reshape the whole thing. in other words, eliot's explaining where his clan comes from. still, the idea of revolution, i think, is what is interesting about the lecture, especially considering the fact that many believe the nation (possibly the world) is experiencing a kind of revolution in literature perpetrated by the online world.

eliot writes "the writers of the past, especially the immediate past, in one's own place and language may be valuable to the young writer simply as something definite to rebel against. He will recognize the common ancestry: but he needn't necessarily like his relatives." he continues, in a slyly self-aggrandizing way, by saying that "from time to time there occurs some revolution, or sudden mutation of form and content in literature. Then, some way of writing which has been practised for a generation or more, is found by a few people to be out of date, and no longer to respond to contemporary modes of thought, feeling, and speech. A new kind of writing appears, to be greeted at first with disdain and derision; we hear that the tradition has been flouted, and that chaos has come. After a time it appears that the new way of writing is not destructive but re-creative." eliot then goes on to mention the names of the revolutionaries, so modestly leaving out himself, and then naming all the canonical writers we now know as "modernists" and "imagists" from america, the one's he's centrally grouped with.

eliot, in a quiet aside, a parenthetical seeming to emphasize the comment's unimportance, also writes that "the most dangerous tendency of American versifiers [and i'll add in prose writers as well] is towards eccentricity and formlessness," which, though eliot leaves this hushed, is obviously the downfall of a socalled revolution. i bring this up because i believe there are many signs of the eliot-revolution happening. the internet has expanded one key type of writing, sometimes called flash fiction, sometimes called a prose poem, sometimes distinguishable, sometimes not. and there's a lot of it out there. some is wonderful and i'll save the time naming names. some online writing, work, things, are not wonderful. and an even greater portion seems stunningly and dully competent. so it seems to me that at the same time a revolution occurs, there's also the inevitable result, the inevitable fallout, which is this group of competents: the dropping in of dilettantes, who copy popular forms of literary rebellion without actually knowing what they're rebelling against; word up words in a sentence so the sentences read just so, sluggishly original, painfully individual, aesthetically arrogant, vapid; create new creations that had already been done in the seventies and eighties; experiment relentlessly for the sake of experimentation, without actually saying much: "a true disciple is impressed by what his master has to say, and consequently by his way of saying it; an imitator - I might say, a borrower - is impressed chiefly by the way the master has said it. If he manages to mimic his master well enough, he may succeed even in disguising from himself the fact that he has nothing to say."

how to avoid being an imitator, a dilettante, that's all, i think, that's all i've been thinking about.