The Real Dead Poets Society

"Someone 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." -Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (Norton, 1094)

We (humans) are so awfully arrogant some (most) times. We look back on the past with condescension and pity, confident that we know so much more in 2008 than was known in 1998 or 1898 or 98 BC. We think that because we have split the atom and created flat screen televisions and know that the world is round--we think this makes us better, more advanced, more intelligent, more worthwhile than past generations. We think: 'how did people survive without cell phones' or wonder how scientists got anything done without the equipment we have available today.

Eliot's response to our arrogant assertion that "we know so much more" than the writers of the past was to remind us that those writers are our new knowledge; their works are the new chapters in the history of human knowledge.

While I enjoy the manner in which Eliot burst our bubble of pride, I would argue whether we do "know" anything more from reading the poets of the past. Now, this is not to say that I do not think their works valuable or their voices important. What I mean is that truth does not change. Human nature has not changed much since Adam and Eve left that garden; our desires, our emotions, our pitfalls have not changed much either. We long for the same things that citizens of Plato's Athens longed for, we are burdened by the same things as the people of Shakespeare's England.

I am skeptical as to whether we learn anything new from the writers of our immediate past--for what is there to say that has not already been said? (This, even I admit, is a bit harsh and pessimistic. I hope that we have more to learn about ourselves, but I wonder whether we have reached the limit of what we are allowed to know.) I think that what we gain from the poets of the past is not new knowledge, but a new way of approaching or articulating truth.