AN ALTERNATIVE TITLE FOR THIS ESSAY might have been “Tradition and an Individual Talent.” As T. S. Eliot declared in 1919, “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His signification, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Poets who would write after the age of twenty-five must acquire, according to Eliot, a “historical sense” of the tradition within which they write. This sense involves an awareness “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence,” as well as a feeling embedded in one's bones that “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer … has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot 1975, 38). Hence the most individual poets and artists or, more precisely, the most distinctive parts of their work do not—and Eliot also means should not—abandon the old: the new work “does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen” (39).

I have returned to this cornerstone of the literary-critical past, to Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” partly in order to provide a motive for intermediality—for a close reading of a singular contemporary poem within the verbal traditions and visual forms it cites (or sights)1 and changes—and partly in order to explore a question: is there a connection between the appreciative relation to the works of dead poets and the relation to certain material, sometimes mundane, objects? Tentatively, I would posit that in both cases a wish to have and hold, an impulse to possess and even purloin the work may arise, for an apparently necessary attribute of this desired thing is its being placed, in some way, out of or beyond one's reach.

Thus a deeply appreciative, active relation to dead poets, artists, and variously inaccessible relics of the past (a relation that may name itself, without embarrassment, love) may inspire not only metaphor and poetry but also larceny. As effect is to cause, so appropriation or, plainly put, stealing is to the appreciation for the presenced absence of a great poem, picture, or other highly valued thing. In short, this desirous love may lead to larceny.