The artist is usually spoken of as being ahead of his 
time simply because he is intensely aware of his 
time. Most people live in the previous age, no matter 
what the period or what the culture. Only artists 
have the faculty to perceive their own time. The 
models that they build seem prophetic because they 
are laden with images of how we will feel later when 
we have come to live with these new forms. T.S. 
Eliot remarked apropos of Dante that he does not 
tell us what people believed in the 13th century, but 
rather how it felt to have such beliefs. In other 
words, the artist provides not the action, but the 
reaction to the new situations.