H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 7 8Each work of art is a miraculous new creation. It is an echo or
repetition of God’s act of creating the world. Like the Almighty, the
artist conjures his or her work out of nothing. It is the imagination
that inspires it, and the imagination is a matter of possibility rather
than actuality. It can summon into being things that never existed
before, like ancient mariners with hypnotic powers or pieces of
pottery given to making philosophical statements. Even so, the
artist can never quite get on terms with God, who as far as creation
goes has got there first and pulled off a product hard to beat. The
poet may imitate the divine act of creation, yet she does so from
her restricted situation in time. In any case, this theory is plainly at
odds with what writers actually get up to. No work of art springs
out of nothing. Coleridge did not invent ancient mariners and
Keats did not dream up Grecian urns. Like any other artist,
Romantic writers forged their art out of materials which they
did not manufacture themselves. In this sense, they are more like
bricklayers than minor deities.
The Romantic impulse to make it new is inherited by modernism.
The modernist work of art takes a stand against a world in which
everything seems standardised, stereotyped and prefabricated. It
gestures to a realm beyond this second- hand, ready- made civilisa-
tion. It aims to make us see the world afresh – to disrupt our
routine perceptions rather than to reinforce them. In its strange-
ness and specificity, it tries to resist being reduced to just another
commodity. Yet if a work of art were absolutely new, we would not
be able to identify it at all, rather as the true aliens are not dwarfish
and many- limbed but perched invisibly in our laps at this very
moment. To be recognisable as art, a work must have some
connection with what we categorise as art already, even if it ends
up by transforming the category out of all recognition. Even a