We’re not necessarily looking for beautiful poems because no-one can set out to write such a thing – they may turn out beautiful or not – but rather, poems about the experience of finding something beautiful. Beauty can arise anywhere, of course. It may involve a work of art or a scene, but it won’t be beautiful just because they were. It will be how the artwork or scene, or any other kind of experience, inspired you to express your feeling about it.
We’re concerned that it has become difficult to write or even talk about beauty (except in relation to the cosmetics industry) and this is a serious loss – for if we can no longer talk about beauty, will we become unable to recognise it? The problem goes back a long way. In An Argument About Beauty, an essay in her last book At the Same Time, Susan Sontag traces how, over centuries, certain works of art and certain scenes were claimed by academics to have ‘higher’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘intellectual beauty’. This came to be seen as elitist in a democratic age so that, by the mid-20th century, it became difficult to describe new works of art or indeed anything as beautiful. The common term of praise became “interesting” and this itself has become almost meaningless. As Sontag puts it: “Imagine saying That sunset is interesting”.
The most numbing effect of ‘higher beauty’ is a belief that beauty is found only in certain subjects and in certain literary, visual and musical forms. This has led to intolerance and, at worst, destructiveness: the Nazis’ admiration of traditional artworks while burning modern art as degenerate; Orwell’s wish that the Anarchists had blown up Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia; the Taliban’s destruction of the huge statues of Buddha at Bamyan.
The opposite view has long been expressed quietly and is now being heard more clearly. In her radical essay of 1856, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, George Eliot had no doubt that fiction could be both unconventional and beautiful: “Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful”. She believed in experimentation with form and in the power of beautiful writing to make people more thoughtful, to make them in a practical sense more moral.
Both these themes have been taken up in Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) and by Zadie Smith implicitly in her novel On Beauty (2005) and more explicitly in her essays, some recently reprinted in Changing My Mind. Sontag’s summation is most far-reaching: contemplation of beauty makes us wiser (“the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness”) and is fundamental to being human (“Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent , the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions”).
Perhaps the clearest statement of what we’re looking for is in George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.
We believe that to see something as beautiful is the surest way of piercing the wadding, however briefly, and that this can arise with other people (all ordinary human life) as well as with nature (the grass growing, the squirrel’s heartbeat). It was this that led George Eliot’s great contemporary poets, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, to their piercing visions of the world and their radical experiments with form and language. And both respond to human life as strongly as to nature: Hopkins found beauty in the life and death of a labourer (Felix Randal) as much as in the flight of a hawk (The Windhover).
Or take the two erotic poems from the past printed in Magma 46: Sir Thomas Wyatt’s They flee from me that sometime did me seek and Anne Sexton’s Us. Readers have found them beautiful, but the poets were writing about experiences they found beautiful and wanted to record and relive. We hope you will want to do the same.
Laurie Smith, editor of Magma 48, with Rob A Mackenzie as assistant editor, invites you to submit poems stimulated by anything connected with ‘it was beautiful’ as well as poems on other subjects. Please send any queries about the theme to the editors at contributions@magmapoetry.com
The deadline is 16 July 2010. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.
For me, it’s clear that ideas of beauty have been handed down to us, all of them.
If you’re born into a beauty system, you’re practically defenceless.
Sometimes we chime in with a resonating confirmation, and sometimes we fight back.
Plastic puke might be beautiful in certain circumstances.
I agree somewhat with George. We are taught what is beautiful by those around us, look at the affect the media has on young girls growing up now. The idea of beauty is one of impossible perfection, carbon copies. To be different is deemed ugly.
To stop and look, really look at things with no preconceptions takes some doing, but in doing so beauty reveals itself.
I am so glad you wish for poems that ‘find beauty’, rather than those about beauty. The experience of having your heart swell and your head become dizzy while looking at something innoculous is a wonderful thing.
Well generally beauty is that kind of excuse for life – as Adorno said, that “paralysing and stimulating narcotic extract boiled out of external life” – although he actually said that about the new – but if the shoe fits, wear it. I think there is only one pleasure, and its in all pleasure; self-anihilation. If for that moment you do not exist, and all there is is that sensuous, emotional or aesthetic experience then that is the special point which seems to warrent a grander title then beauty (but not so grand as the “sublime” which sounds like something only the poshest people would appreciate). Alas, I think the most accurately impactual word is orgasmic – but I always think about Cadburies Dairy Milk with that word – my mum was a single mother who dieted and binged, and she had a disconcerting habit of calling the stuff organism. When every I get offered chocolate I tend to say; no thankyou. Hmmm, rather straid from the point there, sorry.