HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Your last chance to judge whether Van Graan’s Green Man Flashing is a classic
What is a classic? Poet and literary critic TS Eliot asked this question in a lecture of that title, delivered in 1944 to the recently formed Virgil Society in London. You can guess the answer: Virgil, the poet laureate of ancient Rome, is the one, the only, the ur-classic to whom all subsequent writers must defer. Half a century later JM Coetzee borrowed Eliot’s question for an essay, which started by expressing bemusement that at the height of the Second World War Eliot paid no attention to the great catastrophe: from the perspective of a Virgil enthusiast "the war is only a hiccup, however massive, in the life of Europe". Coetzee, though sceptical of the ways in which Eliot’s configuration of the western literary tradition was part of an "attempt to give a certain historical backing to a radically conservative political programme for Europe", also had to acknowledge that he (like Eliot) was drawn to Europe’s "classics" from a young age because they were a means of escape from the...
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