Poetry Friday: Of Wilde, Wallpaper, and Why We Write

Lisa — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:16:52 -0700

I've mentioned before what a great extemporaneous speaker Stephen Fry is. This morning I enjoyed his latest "podgram," entitled "Wallpaper."

After some initial meandering, Fry settles in, with his usual eloquence and beautiful, sonorous voice, to discuss Oscar Wilde and his critical involvement in the aesthetic movement.

Fry summarizes aestheticism as viewing the world not in terms of good versus evil, but rather beautiful versus ugly. Nature with its sunsets, its snowy peaks, its fantastic flora and fauna, is beautiful; all ugliness in the world is due to the interference of humankind. But if we view ourselves as only able to mar Nature's perfection, unable to create anything beautiful of our own, hopelessness sets in. What is to stop us, to loosely quote Fry, from crapping in our own nests? That is why, when Oscar Wilde said Americans were so violent because our wallpaper was ugly, he was not simply making a flippant remark.

Recently I was involved in a discussion with other writers about why we write. This was my basic argument: that in writing, as in any other pursuit, you have to believe you have something to offer, some improvement to make (no matter how infintessimal), or you might as well give up—on life, on everything. I believe writing is one way humankind can make the world more beautiful. Writing might also be moral or utilitarian, but in the case of novels, at least, I'm with the aesthetes: I believe their main purpose is to be enjoyed. And I believe the act of writing itself is a way of seeking the truth, making sense of the world from all its clamor—to quote Wildes's "Hélas!":

Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God...

And though scholars disagree on the precise meaning of the final lines of aesthetic forerunner John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," I'll twist them to my own aesthetic ends by concluding thusly:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at The Well-Read Child!

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Poetry Friday: Of Wilde, Wallpaper, and Why We Write