Tradition or Fashion

Thanks to Ken Myers for passing on the following quotes from Wendell Berry’s essay “The Specialization of Poetry”:

“I do not believe that people who have experienced chaos are apt to praise or advocate any degree or variety of it . . . . Formlessness is, after all, neither civilized nor natural. It is a peculiarly human evil, without analogue in nature, caused by the failures of civilization: inattention, irresponsibility, carelessness, ignorance of consequence. It is the result of the misuse of power. It is neither house nor field nor forest, but rather a war or a strip mine, where the balance between stability and change has been overthrown. The reason we need to have our false certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have . . . .

“If, as I believe, one of the functions of tradition is to convey a sense of our perennial nature and of the necessities and values that are the foundation of our life, then it follows that, without a live tradition, we are necessarily the prey of fashion: we have no choice but to emulate the arts of the ‘practical men’ of commerce and industry whose mode of life is distraction of spirit and whose livelihood is the outdating of fads . . . .

“Why is it necessary for poets to believe, like salesmen, that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstances by adding the new to the old? Why cannot the critical faculty, in poets and critics alike, undertake to see that the best of the new is grafted to the best of the old?”