Art's Visionary Moment

This collection explores the enduring impact of art, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s observation that the experience of a work of art encompasses both a singular moment and a lifelong resonance.

In describing their personal encounters with works that have stayed with them, scholars and artists here address the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical reasons that inform what T. Eliot has called great art’s “experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.”

The collection Art’s Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime was inspired by T. S. Eliot’s observation in his Dante (1929): “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. … There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, … which can never be forgotten, but … is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience.” In this collection, scholars and artists from a variety of fields speak in personal terms, but with what one has called “intellectual passion,” of a work of art (poem, play, novel, film, visual art, among others) that, as Dante suggest, has had an immediate effect on them (the “Visionary Moment” from the title) yet survives “in a larger whole of experience” (that “Last a Lifetime” in the collection’s sub-title). Some of the titles of essays already submitted show the range of this inquiry: “Conversations with the Dead”; “Playing Richard III: The Experience of a Moment and a Lifetime”; “Picasso’s ‘Three Musicians’”; “Poetry Meets Power: Tamburlaine the Great”; “Pleasant Dreaming with ‘Thanatopsis’”; “From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale”; “Fight the Power” Spike Lee’s Visionary Moment”; and “Plastic Art Moment.”