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We cannot say at what point technique ends or where it begins
A tidy review in the Boston Globe by Bill Pritchard of Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, by Helen Vendler. He wraps it with the famous T.S. Eliot quote about technique. Reminded of it, I am surprised by how well that harmonizes with this P.N. Medvedev / M.M. Bakhtin bit I came across recently. From The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928):
Such a conception of the means of representation allows no suggestion of a contrast between the technique of representation taken as something inferior, as an auxiliary, and creative intention as something higher, as a superior goal. Artistic intention itself, being artistic, is from the very beginning given in technical terms, so to speak. And the object of this intention, its content, is not thought of outside the system of the means of its representation. From this point of view there is no need to draw a line between technique and creativity. Everything here has a constructive meaning. Anything incapable of such a meaning has nothing to do with art.
Remarks: 1 of 1
Remark · Zach · 13 March 2008
This is all tied together by Yve Alain Bois, in the masterly introduction to Painting As Model. It also includes this quote by Sergei Eisenstein, from “In The Interest Of Form”:
As soon as a film director starts thinking about the problem of the expressive means of the materialization of an idea, the suspicion or accusation of formalism falls on him with a revenge … To baptize such a director ‘formalist’ partakes of the same hasty lack of foresight as that of calling scientists studying the manifestation of syphilis ‘syphilitic’.