| | The C.L.R. James Institute: Text: "Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09) |
 | | James drew particular attention to the tension which often existed between form and substance, (this was what he had already referred to in his interpretation of Beethoven's music) and, for him, it was that struggle which often produced the greatest, the most original, work. |
 | | James held that it was in the experience of the popular arts (and not in the writings of Hemingway, Faulkner or the intellectuals), that the problem Whitman and Melville struggled to grasp, namely the relationship between individual and society, received its sharpest and most concrete expression. |
 | | James also followed the critical premise made explicit in his earlier writings that the artistic work itself must be the starting point for an exploration of the broader context, of the process by which social and historical forces become refracted through a particular creative personality. |
| www.clrjamesinstitute.org /popudem.html (13286 words) |