--- T S Eliot, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent, suggested by Bret Battey a propos the previous Basho quote
"[The artist] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe - the mind of his own country - a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind - is a mind which changes... That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the different between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show."
