Lively Archaeology

A rare occasion when T. S. Eliot brings up Corinth. Arguing for a relationship with antiquity that is so lively as to be as present as the present. This is a complicated but fundamental argument for a kind of modernism of cyclical time and a cosmic banal present (Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, H. D.)

"We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as present to us as the present."

Eliot is critiquing attempts to naturalize antiquity by making it seem close to us in sentiment or form. He is writing against Gilbert Murray's translation of Euripides, whose performance he just saw in the theater.

I read this 1920 plea for an ancient present while the little one was playing violin upstairs in the fabulous Green Tambourin (noted below).