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So, when did art (not just poetry) become so subjective?
I had this discussion in a class concerned with teaching art to schoolkids. I would be interested to hear opinions, facts, lies, etc. - in other words, the usual contributions. -
We are involved in our I
that is why
Our I our chief motivator
our I objectifies we
When did it happen? Was it not always so? In the eye of the maker if not the beholder?
If not? Then I don't know.
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It was not always so. The first person personal pronoun was rarely used in poetry before the turn of the twentieth century. Visual arts were attempts to imitate reality, rather than to make a statement on it. Dance (atleast in the western world) was impersonal - like ballet, the dancer actually representing the story - until Modern Dance came along and legitimized the "reaction" and "response" of dance. Theater rarely focused on character, nearly always relying on narrative.
One hundred years ago, if you had said "My poetry comes from my soul", folks would have considered you an idiot and a (perhaps) talentless hack. -
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I still consider people who say that to be idiots.
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A lot of them are. But, we need to remember that many good-to-great poets started out as idiots. The smart idiots try to learn a few things discover a world beyond their "souls".
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"But, we need to remember that many good-to-great poets started out as idiots." -- You're right, particularly since I was one of 'em. lol
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nope
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Cracks
You guys.........
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Pronouns
The plural & singular first person personal pronoun has been used widely in English poetry for hundreds of years Scott.
Charles of Orleans (1394-1465)
‘A lovers’ Confession’: My ghostly father I me confess………
This is the first poem in the ‘Oxford Book of English Verse’ that is not labelled ‘anonymous’ -- before the 14th century.
Virtually 70% of the poems have the first person personal pronoun ‘I’ or the plural 'we' in them.
Nine hundred or so pages later, well into the late nineteenth century it is the same.
I worry about you Scott.
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Is it used in the same contexts, I wonder? In other words, somewhere along the line, I believe, people started using it more to tell how they felt or were affected by events - I recognise that it was used, before, but I am thinking it was used far less and in a different context (merely placing the correspondent into the narrative).
At some point we turned toward this sort of self-indulgent, poetry-as-therapy aesthetic - which is okay, I guess, until one begins to believe that others should read it, too.
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I see where you are coming from
I know what you mean. I really think a lot of poetry for at least the past 500 years has been a form of ego examination though. A lot of the metaphysical poets never actually published their poems. Who were they writing for? -
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It wouldn't surprise me that they were writing for themselves - at least they didn't foist it onto the world.
I honestly believe that most people these days who start writing poetry at an early age are writing introspective poems. It is probably a natural place to start when you are young and self-centered (and I don't mean that in a negative sense - I think it is a natural human condition to be self-centered - but more in the sense of being not yet responsible for much but oneself). It is where I started.
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Id, Ego, Super Ego, Superman, Batman & Adelmann
I think there is an argument for a lot of the arts, that they were originally made by craftspeople. Probably for more utilitarian or just purely decorative & aesthetic reasons. I don't know how much that holds up in poetry though. Unless you are talking about the Iliad or something. Langland's Piers Plowman opens with the second line having the first person pronoun. Bunyan's 'The Pilgrims Progress' could be viewed as a prose poem: "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world.......". I know they both had a didactic agenda, but the sense of ego is apparent. -
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I don't understand how an artist's portrayal of the world as he/she sees it can be anything but subjective.
It seems to me that the value placed on the work by the world at large depends wholly on how the WAL reacts to the work. If it speaks to their psyche in a pleasurable and recognisable way they will like it.
Most good artists see the world in a different way to most of their contemporaries, and present that different way. It often takes the WAL another generation to allow the validity of that view. Sometimes it never happens.
The artist will always struggle with bringing into the public domain a private view, or understanding, of the world. The realisation of this view is their work, self-imposed and lonely task that it is. Once realised, there is an alchemical change in how the world itself adjusts, to include this new view.
So art, as a subjective comment on the world, then becomes objective. It is all a process, rather than a product, of change.
That's my ten cent's worth, anyway. -
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Skippy's mate has 10c
Ah......the old subjective ontological approach eh? "To exist is to perceive or to be perceived": George Berkeley.
Do the cans of Castlemain still exist in the fridge after you have closed the door? -
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Not in my fridge, mate.
Not even in my darkest days would I drink that Schroedinger's cat's piss!
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Yes, pania, that is also what I am saying
albeit more wordy and strange. That's me. 
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Where would they have published them? Who would have read them? Weren't most people illiterate? Wasn't the printing process extremely painstaking at that time? I think most stuff still was being copied by hand in monasteries.
I don't know when poetry started appearing in newspapers or when poetry mags as we know them today took off but it was a bit later that the Metaphysicial poets' time, wasn't it? I have some old clippings of poems in newspapers that ladies used to cut out and glue in their autograph albums and I have an old copy of "The Dial" but they are turn-of-the-(20th)-century.
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Our individual I is found in our everything
is what I am saying.
Yes we can take a back seat
let others do the driving
through dance, portrayal of characters
and within our poems
but the I is innermost
and washes through.
The trick I guess
in order to make it more palatable to view
is to hush the you
and as it speaks quietly of other things
no one will notice
that it was still your beautiful soul
or tortured soul
that moved you thus.
Can a poem written by a drone, a soulless soldier, a robot's muse
move the heart to laughter or tear
if they have no personal idea what it is or how it feels?
Our soul, our I, portrays our truth as we see it, touch it, experience it
to dismiss this as a case of ego and self-centered getting in the way
when such is the very thing that draws it to the page
well that to me seems overblown something.
We always begin with the I
as it pertains to everything
and then, yes, take to the shadows
and do your puppetry
but the I always holds the strings
and makes the movements unique.
And I don't want to shove dirt on my I and bury me
I want my I to shine through the trees and leaves
twinkle in the sky
don't you?
That can't be such an awful thing, for the world is full of I and they, who are searching, and sometimes I knows the score and just needs to be seen.
Room for all. Those who seek the higher levels will achieve. The I beneath shall mill. -
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(mills)
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We'll mill together then my pania chum. And consider ourselves in great company.
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do two minions make a mill?
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I have no opinion on the minion, naturally.
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But you, as a minion, have an opinion on a pinion, no?
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I like to pin my opinion out on stalks...somewhere out there with my eyeballs.
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Cyney asked
"Who were they writing for?" Weren't many of them writing for each other - in between being divinely inspired (writing for God)? -
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For whom does anyone write? To assuage the itch of the soul?
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I mean like in correspondance with each other - or how Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein. Even competitions - I recall something about Keats getting out of prison and a comp.
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I love the story of how Frankenstein was birthed. I've read as much of Polidori as I can, since. What an amazing man!
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I think Frankenstein had one of those new-fangled water births.
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How can you say "new-fangled"? We've been giving birth that way since we were fish in the primal ocean.
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Bolts
Bolt necked monsters haven't though. -
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Wasn't that the real tragedy of the story? That the monster longed for a female, with whom to share the world? One of the saddest views of the world I have read, is the part in the story where he lives in the leanto beside the cottage, observing the interplay of realtionships between the members of a family, and yearns to be part of it.
We all recognise the bolt necked monster as ourselves, somehow. -
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Flat headed bolty chicks
Yeah, you kind of feel sorry for him. I think, apart from inventing Science fiction (virtually) she touched a spot deep down in our psyche, almost in a mythological way.
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Keats was quite poor I think, compared to the other Romantics, Byron always regretted calling him names. Mind you Byron could talk; club footed git with an Oedipus complex!
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Possibly. I think some of them, like Crashaw & Carew didn't show almost anyone their poems until years had passed. Some were published posthumously.
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I know that Vaughan and Herbert corresponded and that Vaughan emulated his style, speaking of the metaphysical.
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Cromwell's warts
Yeah, sounds about right. I think they (the metaphysicals) were sometimes on opposing sides of the civil war. It may explain some things.
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When did art become subjective?
I guess around the time the cavemen started painting their hunts at Lascaux? Is that any different than modern man keeping a photo album of our family vacations? And don't look now but there's not a stonecutter in history who didn't carve his likeness in a greenman or a gargoyle, not to mention the architect, who always had a self-portrait, usually holding the model of the castle or cathedral. -
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I could be wrong, but, for the most part, wasn't the artist usually trying to record his/her view of reality, rather than his/her reaction to (or impression of) reality.
In the visual arts, it seems to me, portraiture seems to have predominated, and it seems to have been an attempt to show the subject in a "real" light. Beginning probably with the Impressionists, the artist was commenting on the subject. The Impressionists, I think, were known for their use of light and color - reflecting their "impression" of the subject (since our impression registers visually through our interpretation of light and color.
It seems to me, the French Impressionism movement in film was doing much the same thing. At about the same time, Isadora Duncan and the paris School were changing the way artistic dance was choreographed and performed - making it into a much more intimate and personal thing. Music and theater underwent similar movements, I think. -
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You can't really read ancient poetry like the Eddas and think they were recording "reality", no. Much folk art, dance, music, and poetry that was preserved through word of mouth doesn't strike me as being "realistic," though surely they did record and feature real events as well as the fantastical and mystical realms.
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So, there really is no such thing as "Modern Poetry", only new poetry?
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I think Modern defines a movement, which was followed by Post-Modernism?
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But, does it represent anything new at all, really? I mean if free verse wasn't new, and if self-exposition wasn't new, what is it really but just today's work?
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free verse was new.
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Didn't Abraham Cowley write "free verse" (in the mid-seventeenth century)?
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Or John Milton?
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As far as French Impressionism in painting goes
Claude Monet had eye problems - his perception of the world did influence an entire generation of "seers". -
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As did Vincent, hence the auras around the stars in "Starry Night"
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well, I see those auras myself so I'm not sure about that. lol.
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Objective vs. Subjective in Poetry
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Adding your reply:
Scott Adelmann
Jul 9 11:38 AM
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