"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Anastasia P. Lytle

When, and why, did society start believing that art is intrinsic and subjective? Nowadays, when analyzing art or literature, we are asked, “How did the narrator’s (painter’s) life reflect his work?” (Oh, excuse me, we would say his or her, and throw grammar to the wind, so as not to offend anyone). Political correctness aside, the current thought in art is that it is necessary for the artist to express himself. The idea that what is being expressed underlies a deeper Truth is virtually nonexistent. What the artist is portraying is nothing more than a shallow reflection of his paltry emotions. For the sake of argument, let’s say that Art is nothing more than a reproduction on paper of someone’s inner being. How, then, is this universal? I don’t care what someone is feeling, and I am certainly not going to waste time pondering his personal feelings when I could instead be thinking about my own problems.

But when we look at a later Monet painting, we don’t see a man, slowly becoming blind, whose entire life had depended on his eyes, frantically try to get in a last few strokes before he could no longer see at all. Instead, we see a bridge, or a sunset. And that sight evokes mental images, personal reflections, and even remembered smells. What happened ultimately to the artist does not matter, because we have stepped into the painting ourselves. This is Art. One man’s interpretation can be universal. When Rudyard Kipling penned “The Female of the Species is More Deadly than the Male,” he may very well have been hiding in the basement from his angry wife. But the poem is not subjective, and is not limited to him. It reflects an issue that has been key since the first time Eve had to remind Adam to take out the garbage. Art is not one man’s story; it is an endless Story of Man.

The current idea, however, is that somehow, an artist cannot truly be an artist unless he has a deep, mysterious, or repressed past. Would Byron have written “Don Juan” without Lady Caroline Lamb? Most likely. Would Keats have been great if he hadn’t had a worthless brother, George? Yes. Certainly life experiences, triumphs and tragedies, help give artists ideas — look at Tennyson and “In Memoriam.” But then what of his “The Eagle”? This brief poem is rich in figurative language, but lacking in personal reflection.

Joseph Addison, in “On the Pleasures of the Imagination,” says that “by the pleasures of the imagination or fancy . . . we have the power of retaining, altering, and compounding these images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of picture and vision that are most agreeable to the imagination” (Adams 284). This is to say that we think about, and can expound upon, things we have seen or even read. A man does not need to witness to the horror of war to feel empathy for soldiers. Lord Tennyson did not have to be on that hill in order to shake a nation with “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Poetry, and all Art, may well be personal to the poet, but Art has no business being subjective. Art was not created so that man would have an outlet in which to vent his private and unique emotions. Art stands as a mirror, reflecting the Emotions and the Desires that all men feel. If Art only applies to the person who wrote it, then what right does he have to force his emotions on the rest of the world? But this is not what Art was meant to be. Modern artists say that Art is subjective and “means something to them” because they have no talent, and want to make money by scamming people into believing that mere circles or paintings that look as though a cat vomited on the canvas is painting, or that random words thrown together is poetry. Let us examine two modern poets and analyze their writing styles and message. The first is a poem written by a Ph.D., a professor of literature at the University of California; the second, by an American attorney.

Let us examine this poem for a minute. First of all, the poet uses no punctuation or syntax, so there is no way to tell one thought from another at a first glance, and if that were not crime enough against the English language, she makes up absolutely ridiculous and meaningless words. How can this transcend language to reach everyone, if it is just gibberish? Secondly, putting aside the fact that there is no real coherent thought or form here, the poet only aims to reach people who apparently have bad complexion. This is not Art. This is a poorly written “Dear Abby” knockoff about how to treat acne, with odd and unclear references to pancakes.

Let us deviate for a moment and examine this gibberish. Why do I openly mock “hechizando” and not mention Lewis Carroll? Carroll announces to the world that

We don’t know what an uffish thought is, or tulgey woods, but the words instinctively, by their very sounds, provide visuals in our own minds. We can see and hear a monster whiffling and burbling, and it scares us! This kind of gibberish is acceptable because it still conforms linguistically and makes itself known in our heads. In other words, Carroll’s gibberish is so well constructed that the words may as well be real. As Michael Ende suggests in The Neverending Story, the right name can make something real to us (would we really have loved The Lord of the Rings so much if Sauron had instead been called “Nancy?”). Lewis Carroll is not butchering the language, but using his mastery of the language to expand it.

“Hechizando” is nothing more than a butchering of the gerund of the Spanish verb “Hacer” meaning “to do or make.” It serves no purpose but to ravish a language. And why is rhythm no answer to cancer, and did that have any meaning or was this woman desperate for a rhyme? Now, let us stop deviating and go on to examine another modern poem.

Here, sensory language is used to describe winter, and even though the poem is in free verse, there is still a sense of Form, there is one coherent thought. Putting aside his personal self, the poet throws his whole being into describing Winter, that one True Winter in the sky, of which we have a mere reflection three to five months of the year. There is nothing subjective here, nothing that is directed at one particular audience or one personal venting of feelings that cannot reach everyone, even though Stevens may have just come in from a snowstorm when this was penned. The poem itself still captures something universal.

Emotions, however much we would like to believe them to be, are not unique, personal, or “different” from person to person. Some people may feel emotion more deeply than others, but everyone has suffered pain and loss at some point in his life. Everyone has had at least one brief moment of joy, and everyone, however young or old, has known rejection. I am not denying people’s right to “feel” about their circumstances. But when Thomas Gray wrote “Ode: On the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfish” he was lamenting the loss of a cherished pet, yet it was also written as poetry –not without thought for form or rhyme. Even in his grief, Gray wrote something that can touch any reader, not just people who have lost their cats in goldfish bowls. Art must be accessible to everyone, or it has no purpose.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Art is not universal; that it is completely subjective and personal. Langston Hughes would have no business, then, writing most of his poetry, including anything on slavery, since he was never a slave, nor his “Madam” collection, since he was never a woman. Tennyson was never the Lady of Shallot, and John Keats had never existed in a previous life as a Grecian urn. And Oliver Goldsmith would never be able to remark upon what transpires “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.” Religious Art would be altogether nonexistent; since most martyrs are not considerate enough to put a halt to their martyrdom and paint us a few pretty pictures of their impending torture and death. How can anyone but Joan of Arc know what it is like to be a peasant girl, fulfilling God’s mission and being used as a political pawn of men? And yet we dare write of her, and paint her, because Joan can be embodied in Art, and Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw are as capable as anyone of showing us the life of the maid from Lorraine through Art.

So what, then, if not solely a man’s life experiences, forms good art? A combination of talent and training eventually creates a good poet. Imagination is extremely important, and that can be formed via daily occurrences in people’s lives. One does not have to have lived in a sewer to understand suffering and even agony. People who can relate to an emotion only if they have shared a specific experience are shallow and lacking in empathy. A true poet takes what he sees in his life and the lives of others and shapes it into words that can have meaning for anyone, not just for him. If poetry only reaches a specific person or audience, then it has failed to live up to the duty of Art, which is to transcend individuals and instead send a message that can touch Humanity. At the same time, though, poetry must be logical and have some sense of meter. There must be a sense of form — even in Free verse, else what is to distinguish poetry from prose? The Wallace Stevens poem mentioned above has a sense of rhythm, even though it is written in free verse. There is still a structure; the words are not carelessly dashed onto the page like so much garbage. Now, a beautiful example of form can be seen when Coleridge writes:

We see terrifying visions when reading these few lines of “Kubla Khan,” a poem that inspires much wonder and awe, and yet it is perfectly structured a beautiful example of iambic quadrimeter. A poem can be both perfectly metered and logical, and at the same time deeply intense. Here, the poet portrays intense emotion, and yet this came from a dream, from a vivid imagination. Coleridge never was forced to serve in a chain gang or something equally ludicrous in order to have visions of Art, of something surpassing himself, that could touch everyone.

This is not to say that our experiences do not help shape us. What people experience in life, and how they react to situations, can have a profound impact on them. Life experiences can certainly inspire poems (Again, look at Tennyson and “In Memoriam” — but that is not to say that he wouldn’t have written something else equally deep and moving without the death of Arthur Hallam). People write about what they know and what they can dream. Certainly there are situations that really tragic and intensely painful, and I am not demeaning suffering. My argument is that should someone choose to share his experiences, be they happy or sad, with the world, the Art of what he writes should transcend his personal experience and become something to which anyone can relate. From personal agony or joy can stem poems that reach the world, and a true artist can turn his elation or suffering into something that can touch anyone, if he were a Zulu warrior or an American doctor. Art has no limits, and is not bound by one man’s view.

In conclusion (for it is the form of an essay to have a conclusion) there is no such thing subjective art. There is only Art, and to truly be Art, it must transcend some haughty professor’s idea of “expressing one’s innermost self” and be more than a statement that profoundly impacts the feminist surrealist movement. Art is not limited by time, space, or gender, but rather surpasses all of these and instead captures the essence of what it means, and has always meant, to be Human.

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