Day 2: Writers are artists with words as their medium. What author is your favorite word stylist?
As with day 1, I can’t choose only one.
I love Jane Austen, because she used words so effectively that she taught without people knowing they were being taught, and aimed arrows without the deserving recipients knowing where the sting came from.
She illuminated the unfair inequities, in both class and gender, that marred her society, all under the guise of an entertaining story.
Yet the stories themselves, and especially her artfully drawn character portraits, were so engaging and insightful that they still move readers over 200 years later.
Perhaps her portrayals of the impressive changes people are able and willing to make in their character and behavior were a bit optimistic, but isn’t that part of the job of an artist – to show would could and should be possible? She herself said that even if her own life could not have such a happy ending, she would make sure that her characters eventually would.
One can’t help but wonder, wistfully, what even greater works of art she might have created if she had lived past 41!
Having given credit where credit is due to one novelist who truly deserves to be called an artist, I will now transition to poets and poetry, in my mind the most direct and highest form of verbal art.
Poets are literally word artists, using words as material much the way a painter uses paint. They are able to take language – something common, utilitarian, and available to each of us, and make it something more.
Though I am especially drawn to several contemporary poets, generally preferring the freer forms and modern language of contemporary poetry, I enjoy the work of poets of various times, working in various styles.
I have long been a fan of the intensely emotional, lyrical, and thoughtful German poet, Rainer Rilke, though I’ve been limited to reading his work in translation.
However, if I have to choose one favorite, it would still be the poet I liked first, as a young girl – the probably obvious choice – Emily Dickinson. She was so ahead of her time in the freedom and eccentricity or her form and style.
She conveyed, with amazing ability, a deeply rich inner life that contrasts sharply, almost shockingly, with the extreme, partially self-imposed limits of her external existence.
Like so many artists, she was barely appreciated or known in her lifetime, but achieved a level of posthumous fame and even adulation that would likely have astonished, though perhaps not entirely surprised her.