Little more than a series of jottings

Little more than a series of jottings

Like all animals we act with reference to the future. But unlike other animals, we are self-conscious; we are aware that ordinary life is an unintelligible sequence of actions. Thus, we alone are also equipped to look to an ordering principle which will give intelligibility in mere sequence. For Aristotle, that principle is virtue.
It is in the nature of arts - including literature - that they shape themselves to social changes, whether these are major upheavals altering the lives of a population in midcourse or slower shifts in the social climate, hardly perceptible to those who live through them. - How a form relates to the life of the age in which it emerges, or re-emerges, is among the central questions a student of the arts must explore.
Patters of Poetry, Introduction: Form and the Age, by Miller Williams