Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
61. "eliot's reputation as an elitist has obscured one of the most significant features of his thought. at the bottom of everything he wrote, including his greatest poems, is a search for common ground."
64. that desire manifests in his desire for a common style (certainly a rich soil for growing arguments about elitism), which he defines as "one which makes us exclaim not 'this is a man of genius using the language,' but 'this realizes the genius of the language.' (OPP 65)"; thus "the perfect classic [would] be popular with the general public because it [would] have sprung from a community of taste, a community of ideas"
65. creating a community of ideas, and being, as an artist, responsible to the other ideas in the (timeless) community was easier when history was uncomplicated, was just a stable tradition handed-down; it's gone now.
67. eliot's obsession w/community wasn't about communication but about collaboration: "eliot required common ground because he thought of art as collaboration, and collaboration is contingent upon common ground"; "eliot's definition of collaboration...may be found in the most ordinary dictionary. to collaborate means simply 'to labor together' or 'to cooperate willingly in a project.' collaboration is the doing of one job by more than one person. at the center of eliot's theory of art is the view that the greatest art can only be achieved through collaboration, and that the greatest artists are not necessarily the most brilliant or energetic, but the most willing and most able to collaborate"; "three types of collaboration" eliot saw the greatest artists as taking advantage of: (1) with the reader, (2) with philosophy/ideology, (3) with "other artists, both living and dead"
68. (1) eliot adored a particular comedienne's performances b/c "'the working man who went to the music-hall and saw marie lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art' (SE 407). miss lloyd's work of art, her act, was not what she did alone on stage, but what she and her audience did together." (2) eliot thought blake a lesser poet than dante b/c dante borrowed from/built on philosophers' work whereas blake invented his own, in isolation.
69. (3) high praise from eliot: a poet with a high "capacity for assimilation" (SE 271) or who "collaborated shamelessly" (SE 140)--the idea was to work with others' material & voice toward that voice the whole community could be (was already) a part of. "crucial to eliot's view of art as collaboration is the idea that collaboration must not be limited by time. a poet must actiely collaborate not only with present, but with future audiences....not only with present philosophers and artists, but with past ones. extra-temporal collaboration" is the subject-matter of T&IT, wherein although "ordinarily, tradition and invidual talents are opposite[s]" in criticism,
70. to eliot they "are not opposites but complements, not two concepts, but two parts of one. he equally deprecates the tendency to praise an artist for conformity to past models and the tendency to praise him for 'those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else' (SE 4)"; tradition = "the collective personality, so to speak, realized in the literature of the past" (OPP 58); like his "historical sense....the living presence of other artist-collaborators, dead ones included, within living artists" (SE 4); & this is what artists have to have to be great, what "protects their work against narrowness and eccentricity"
71. he did it w/his own plays, too--the audience was keyly involved & actively engaged-with.
72. "many aspects of form in eliot's poetry (and in the modern arts generally)--e.g., allusiveness, juxtaposition, fragmentation, multi-perspectivism, deliberately unfinished surfaces--are comprehensible as stratagems for forcing collaboration from readers"; "when the members of a culture share basic beliefs and basic ways of organizing ideas, artists can use these common assumptions not only as reference points in their art, but...as a guide to form. collaboration with contemporaries, especially with an audience, is possible on many levels....collaboration with artists and with thinkers of other periods is also possible, or at least is unimpeded by any traumatic repudiation of the past. with common ground to endow it, collaboration is spontaneous and unproblematic; it does not become a conscious aim in aesthetics. the art produced in such periods of grace will tend to be an extension of life into art, blurring the boundaries between life and art."
73. "but when the members of a culture share no basic intellectual assumptions and no framework for interpreting experience, artists must purge art of ideas and construct their own mental frameworks....art becomes ingrouwn, referring only to itself. and artists...tend to become solipsistic"; "eliot once said that yeats was part of the consciousness of an age that could not be understood without him (OPP 308)."

OPP = On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.
SE = Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1950.