Philip Larkin 2002 “you write because you have to. If you rationalise it, it seems as if you’ve seen this sight, felt this feeling, had this vision, and have got to find a combination of words that will preserve it by setting it off in other people. The duty is to the original experience … [a poet’s writing must] be born of the tension between what he non-verbally feels and what can be got over in common word-usage to someone who hasn’t had his experience.”
This seems like a fairly good definition of the art of writing poetry, whether it is the only definition that fits all writing is debatable. Journalism, for example, attempts to remove the writer’s bias and emotional response to events from their reportage.
Tolstoy maybe puts it better…”Art begins when one person with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications … To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling − this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, passes on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” 1898.
These excerpts were taken from the OU philosophy course material dealing with art, fiction and truth. Some people see a noble purpose in creating art, others take the meaning of aesthetic literally and try to awaken our senses. Shock tactics can provoke diverse reactions. Some people were offended by Damien Hirst’s exhibit Mother and Child (Divided) which showed the corpses of a cow and calf cut in half and preserved in tanks of formaldehyde. Others were fascinated by the originality.
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