For previous ages the exempla maiorum were a confirmation; for us they are a confrontation, and tradition is reversed into a corrective. We are so far removed from tradition that it appears new to us.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, November 13, 2023
Tradition
E.R. Curtius (1886-1956), Essays on European Literature, tr. Michael Kowal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 5: