Thoughts on Biography

Abstract

Few would altogether deny the presence of a personal factor in creativity. But many minimize its importance or assert that it cannot be adequately measured. And certainly no discussion of the biographical dimension of art can proceed without acknowledging both its limitations as an explanatory factor and its difficulties of application as a critical principle. To begin on the most basic level: every work of art is only partially an individual creation. The composer cannot invent the scale or the poet the alphabet. The creative act unites extremes of subjectivity and collective experience; even the most inimitable of psychic materialsdreams and fantasies-belong to a common stock; art is never freely created but issues from a multiplicity of antecedent events which are quite independent of the artist's personality-including the prior history of art, the level of development of its languages and forms, and the needs or demands of patrons or audiences. Among the many who have stressed this point in various contexts, T. S. Eliot observed: We shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his anc tors, assert their immortality most vigorously.' Or, in an African aphorism reported by Ernst Bloch: If this story is worthless, then it belongs to the man who tells it; if it is worth anything, then it belongs to us all.2