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Emulating a Papova Article
CONTEXT/COVER LETTER
My article, “Rainer Maria Rilke on The Purpose of Art,” is written in the style of Maria Popova, a thinker and writer that I have been exploring as part of the summer reading for AP Literature. Her articles often features the thoughts of a single influential thinker that she takes considerable detail explaining and unraveling. The typical layout of Popova’s pieces, which I attempted to emulate, is an introduction with a quote not by the thinker-in-question, then a brief setup to outline the topic and general questions regarding it, later an introduction to the thinker and their works that will be discussed, and finally the ideas of that thinker presented in lengthy quotes with brief discussion beforehand. Miscellaneous stylistic/format elements which are distinctly Papova-esque include the absence of quote explanation, Papova lets the thinker’s words speak for themselves and continues right on with the conversation; the inclusion of—typically—paintings which go along with the text; mentioning of other thinkers with ideas similar to the thinker-in-question during the brief discussions; an emphasis on the chronology of the other thinkers mentioned in reference to the thinker-in-question; ending the discussion with a quote; and lastly, providing the reader with other texts to read should they wish to.
I attempted to incorporate each of these elements above-mentioned into my piece about Rainer Maria Rilke. To accurately imitate Papova I followed her article “Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality” closely as I thought it was the most Papova-esque and also because it was the article I enjoyed most and found most fascinating. As far as diction, I used no contractions and embellished with pointed vocabulary. In terms of style, I kept my writing fresh, piquant, and easily comprehensible. I quite enjoyed this assignment. In the process of planning my article I got to pull some books from my bookshelf that I had not yet touched. The Philosophers, chiefly by Ted Honderich, is a collection of the accomplishments of the great thinkers of history. From this text, I was able to find my supplemental “other thinkers” that Papova mentions—in my case, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I was also reminded of a paper that Dr. Holt sent to me to read about the art of translating poetry, “The Eight Stages of Translation” by Robert Bly. In this paper, Bly describes his process translating Rilke’s poem “XXI” from Sonnets to Orpheus. The poem serendipitously happens to contain a stanza about needing to have a dedication to art which I used to end my piece.
Rainer Maria Rilke on The Purpose of Art
Rainer Maria Rilke on The Purpose of Art
“For there is no place here / that doesn’t see you. You must change your life.”
By Wyatt Woodbery
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls” said era defining painter Pablo Picasso. The prolific artist held the view that art acted as a tool for humans to use in the pursuit of more deeply understanding themselves and reaching their true essence.
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Art is something subjective, people enjoy works of the craft for all sorts of reasons and others dislike them for their own valid views. If art produces such strife and conflict in our world, why then do we keep making it? What is the purpose of this grand calling to create art?
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Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875 - December 29, 1926) considers
this thought in his 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a revelational work that has reverberated through the fabric of the decades since its creation.
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The question of what function art serves, why we make art, or rather why we should or should not make art, as been a question lingering throughout the ages. Nearly forty years before Rilke, Nietzsche took his chance at this aesthetic conundrum, saying that art allows humans to see what they could be, the better versions of themselves and of their lives. Art, therefore, encourages the viewer to become better. Similarly, Rilke writes,
If not, the stone would stand, deformed and cut
under the lucid slope of the shoulders
and wouldn’t ripple like a wild animal’s fur;
and wouldn’t erupt from its boundaries
like a star. For there is no place here
that doesn’t see you. You must change your life.
“Realization Inner Self Of The Being” by Paolo Zerbato
Rilke decides that the purpose of art is to shock the reader—to throw them into a paralytic trance that, once released, imbues the viewer with a sense of duty to become better. Rilke paints this scene of pure exalted rapture ultimately hoping to underline the importance of the imagination the human ability to connect with art:
We could never know his astonishing head
where eyes like apples ripened. Yet
his trunk glows now, like a candelabrum
in which his glances, though dimmed,
still rivet and flicker. If not,
the bow of his breast couldn’t blind you
nor could the faint twist of his loins send its smile
through the spring of procreation.
“Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the
New Man” by Salvador Dalí
Rilke believes that after realizing that ineffable, awesome power of art, one “must change [their] life.” They must dedicate themselves to, as Schopenhauer touted almost a century earlier, the introspective powers of art that allow the view to gain a better understanding of themselves and the universe they live in. This call to dedication is seen in another of Rilke’s poems, “XXI” found in his Sonnets to Orpheus:
Spring is here, has come! The earth
is like a child who has learned her poems—
so many poems! … Her study, long,
strenuous, earns it … the prize comes to her.
Complement Rilke’s poems with literature by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer who both discuss what role art play in our lives, though from a much more erudite and philosophical perspective.