ABSTRACT
Taste See CLASSIC, CULTURE, EVALUATION.
Technique STYLE as a deliberate procedure; literary and artistic craft, connoting formal rather than affective or expressive values. Every writer has employed a (more or less conventional) technique, but the insistence on technique rather than on inspiration, or the reverse, has been related to changing modes of sensibility. Thus, René Wellek follows other critics in maintaining that the distrust of inspiration and an accompanying faith in technique are the major points which set off Symbolism from Romanticism. In this, there exists an unbroken continuity from Poe, Baudelaire and Flaubert to Pound, Eliot and Valery. Pound has declared that he believes in technique ‘as the test of a man’s sincerity’ and Eliot has praised Valéry’s On Literary Technique for projecting the image of the poet as a ‘cool scientist’ rather than as a ‘dishevelled madman’.
