Jonty Claypole
speaker
9,840 appearances
30 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Jonty Claypole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And we've quoted twice now on recent episodes T.S.
Eliot's line about the mythical quality of James Joyce, the way he uses myth in order to make sense of the chaos of modern life and modern art.
And in fact, Joyce himself is able to articulate this prior to Eliot
prior even to writing Ulysses, at the end of Portrait of the Artist, there's a moment where Stephen Dedalus starts thinking about epic poetry as a form from which the artist can build upon.
And he also hits upon the idea that becomes very central to T.S.
Eliot in tradition and the individual talent, that by understanding tradition and imbibing tradition,
the artist, the poet, is able to increasingly remove themselves and their ego from the work as well, so that the work of art becomes disembodied, even if it purports to be about the experience and the autobiographical experience of the writer.
So the passage is this, and I'll read it and we can clarify around it if we need to do so.
Stephen is talking and he says, the simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event.
And this form progresses till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others.
I mean, it's kind of brilliant what he's saying.
And if you take what he's going to do in Ulysses, the epical event at the heart of the book is going to be the meeting between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.
And from that, Ulysses is going to progress till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist, that's Joyce, and from the readers that Ulysses, the book in this encounter, becomes something in between.
Stephen Dedalus continues, the narrative is no longer personal.
This is pure Eliot.
The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.
The personality of the artist at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.
The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination.
The mystery of an aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished.
The artist, like the god of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing his fingernails."
Showing 2441–2460 of 9,840 · page 123 of 492
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