Epigraphs

“Attention precedes invention. Although logos [knowledge or reason] is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.” T.S. Eliot, epigraph to Four Quartets

Epigraphs offer direction, invitation, a thought or teaching to be returned to. They provide a frame and a focus. This one offers a point of entry into poems I, along with many others, have read and reread with deepening gratitude. Each reading awakens new reflections on moments in my own life and on the challenging historical moment we share.  

The words of an unnamed pre-Socratic philosopher introduce the poems with a note of radical humility. What follows, they suggest, is gleaned from generations who have left a rich legacy of thought, insight, spiritual awareness, images and words thick with layers of meaning, all to be held in common. We do not, it reminds us, have a wisdom of our own. Nothing is new under the sun. But everything under the sun may--and must--be made new. 

That was Ezra Pound's advice to Eliot and other poets of their generation: "Make it new." Very different advice from "Make a new thing." The point wasn't to invent, but to receive what the culture offered and turn it to new purposes--the language, the myths and stories, sacred and profane, musical forms, the images, the sounds of ordinary life, the science. What we take for innovation is always a point of emergence, like a shoot breaking the soil, of something with deep roots in the past. 

The epigraph is a kind of poet's manifesto: true creativity begins in obedience, the root of which, obedire, means to listen or pay attention. Listen into collective wisdom, he suggests. Graze on the commons. Honor what humans have held in common--common ground, the common good--what can't be commodified but must be reclaimed and protected again and again, sometimes at great cost.