"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."
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Academics from EnglandAcademics from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesPoets from EnglandPeople from St. Louis
Original Language: English
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Part I
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot
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