Aesthetics

In an essay called “Hamlet and His Problems,” T.S. Eliot asserts that successful writing communicates not through the meaning of the words alone, but more completely through the feeling that the writing conveys. That is to say that successful writing evokes the emotional response, not just the image or idea, the author seeks to communicate. This done by the writer’s composing an “objective correlative;” the thing in words that evokes the feeling the author seeks to convey.

Compare the London fog in this passage from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House,

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river… Fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…”

with Eliot’s description of fog in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:”

“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening…”

In its original meaning, from the Greek, the word “aesthetic” was a description of feeling. (Consider its opposite: anesthetic, the elimination of feeling.) Over time, the word has come to signify simply the appreciation of beauty, a description of anything to do with any form of art, regardless of human response. Perhaps it is another example of the mechanistic nature of modern thinking that equates spiritual interest with superstition. “Aesthetics” should signify the transmission of sentiments, of emotions, not simply data. The objects we write should correlate to a universal sentiment. Somehow we have forgotten that our experience of truth or beauty should be a combination of mental and emotional responses.

Last night I read “The House That Nobody Lives In,” by Joyce Kilmer in an anthology of poetry for children. I’m pretty sure Kilmer does not rank high among 20th century poets in academic circles, but his poem powerfully communicates something about the human condition that more complicated, “great” poets have never communicated, to me anyway. This poem has feeling:

“… a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life…
A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet,
Is the saddest sight, when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.”

Give me writing that moves me, that makes me laugh or cry, worry, or celebrate. Don’t tell me how to feel, show me. Don’t give me art that is intellectual, that moves the “frontiers” of art, that shows me how smart you are. I don’t care about any of that. Aim for my heart and I will feel you, brother.

Full meaning is expressed simply by the choice of words. The objective things you read in my writing will, when the words are properly chosen, convey to you the sentiment I seek to communicate. The feeling (the aesthetic) will be communicated, the way a well-composed lullaby induces sleep or a painting is said to have meaning, as Hemingway is to have said, If I work vey hard and I am very, very lucky.”