Tradition and the Individual Talent

     In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), T. S. Eliot argues that the creative figure “must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and… should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.” Eliot – as somebody who transitioned between Romanticism and Modernism as well as the cultures of America and Great Britain – was clearly a pivotal figure for Boorman, and his first poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) is worked into the soundtrack of Leo the Last (1970) and Zardoz (1974). In the latter case, it stands in for precisely the “consciousness of the past” referred to in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”
    Arthur quotes these lines:
    
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead."

and asks Zed to tell him the next line (“Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—), as if it were part of a shared memory that is then given visual form as a crystal that Zed passes through.
     Eliot’s lines themselves nod to English metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681): "Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball.” The continuity of the creative tradition is thereby linked, for Boorman, to memory, and to one of his many reflexive, hall-of-mirrors devices connecting the human experience of time to the processes of cinema. This gives another layer of meaning to the quest narratives central to Boorman’s films from Point Blank on. As Merlin says in Excalibur, “The Future has taken root in the present.”