Monday, May 10, 2004
Just a few excerpts dept.
A World that Starts with Art
Vendler didn’t use the usual weasel words of people who make a living celebrating the loveliness of art. She wants to put art first, which is not an argument for art as an adjunct to life, or merely something the well-bred individual has attended to on his resume, or something with which to end the weary day after toiling at the biotechnology plant. This is an argument for art as the basic, most fundamental, first access to the world.
In Vendler’s reordered world, politicians would turn to poetry, rather than history, to make sense of the competing claims of the world. Statesmen would consult Dante before Machiavelli; students would be rewarded for anatomizing Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” and frogs from formaldehyde vats.
“I’m not sure we are greatly helped to live our lives by history, since whether or not we remember it, we seem doomed to repeat it,” she said. This is an astonishing thing to say, especially in Washington, especially one year after the last Jefferson lecturer, historian David McCullough, ambled through a dreary speech of platitudes about the importance of educating ourselves with a lively understanding of U.S. history. Vendler is thumbing her nose at all the threadbare permutations of “know your history or you’re doomed to repeat it.”
Talking up the arts isn’t radical; talking up the arts as more fundamental to life than history is. That this seems utopian, if not downright silly to most people, is based on a prejudice against which Vendler has struggled with her life’s work. Her analysis of poetry, methodical, conservative and brilliant, has yielded an argument against the notion that art is somehow less real and less substantial than the material things of the world. In her little book on Seamus Heaney, Vendler quotes the Irish poet getting to the heart of this problem: “In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil -- no lyric has ever stopped a tank.”
But in her speech last night, Vendler groped at a response. “The arts exist to relocate us in the body,” she said. “They situate us on the Earth.”
Far from being unreal, a poem is part of our physical world, sitting on a page, agitating the air with sound waves and, ultimately, animating us right down to our heartbeat and glands. If it’s real, then it can effect change in what we so casually call “the real world.”
¶ 5/10/2004 08:44:00 PM
A World that Starts with Art
Vendler didn’t use the usual weasel words of people who make a living celebrating the loveliness of art. She wants to put art first, which is not an argument for art as an adjunct to life, or merely something the well-bred individual has attended to on his resume, or something with which to end the weary day after toiling at the biotechnology plant. This is an argument for art as the basic, most fundamental, first access to the world.
In Vendler’s reordered world, politicians would turn to poetry, rather than history, to make sense of the competing claims of the world. Statesmen would consult Dante before Machiavelli; students would be rewarded for anatomizing Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” and frogs from formaldehyde vats.
“I’m not sure we are greatly helped to live our lives by history, since whether or not we remember it, we seem doomed to repeat it,” she said. This is an astonishing thing to say, especially in Washington, especially one year after the last Jefferson lecturer, historian David McCullough, ambled through a dreary speech of platitudes about the importance of educating ourselves with a lively understanding of U.S. history. Vendler is thumbing her nose at all the threadbare permutations of “know your history or you’re doomed to repeat it.”
Talking up the arts isn’t radical; talking up the arts as more fundamental to life than history is. That this seems utopian, if not downright silly to most people, is based on a prejudice against which Vendler has struggled with her life’s work. Her analysis of poetry, methodical, conservative and brilliant, has yielded an argument against the notion that art is somehow less real and less substantial than the material things of the world. In her little book on Seamus Heaney, Vendler quotes the Irish poet getting to the heart of this problem: “In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil -- no lyric has ever stopped a tank.”
But in her speech last night, Vendler groped at a response. “The arts exist to relocate us in the body,” she said. “They situate us on the Earth.”
Far from being unreal, a poem is part of our physical world, sitting on a page, agitating the air with sound waves and, ultimately, animating us right down to our heartbeat and glands. If it’s real, then it can effect change in what we so casually call “the real world.”
¶ 5/10/2004 08:44:00 PM
