A Radiance of Words: The Artistic Beauties of Literature

Literature bypasses the immediate senses of sight and hearing, and goes directly for the imagination.

Cropped section of “Calliope Teaching Orpheus,” 1865, by Auguste Alexandre Hirsch. Calliope is the ancient Greek muse of literature. Musée d'art et d'archéologie du Périgord, Périgueux, France. Public Domain

Philosopher and conservative commentator Roger Scruton opens his 2011 book “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction” with this sentence: “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling.”

Scruton then devotes three of his book’s nine chapters to the topics of human beauty, the beauty of nature, and everyday beauty. The last are found in the world around us or in our homes that, by their form and function, strike us as beautiful. For the rest of the book, Scruton draws the reader’s attention to artistic beauty. Here, he analyzes those works deliberately created by humans to appeal to the mind and the senses, to spark the imagination, and to give us pause for wonder.

No matter their background, most people are familiar with the idea of artistic beauty. If asked for examples, even those with little interest in art would likely reply with some of the icons of painting and the visual arts, like “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” the Taj Mahal, and Notre Dame.

The Taj Mahal, in Agra, India. Pawan Sharma/AFP via Getty Images

A minority might also think of classics that appeal to the ear rather than the eye. And here again, even those with limited exposure to this side of artistic beauty might mention masterpieces like Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Odds are, however, that few people would think of citing works from literature as examples of artistic beauty.

The Bones of Verse

Unlike its artistic cousins, literature bypasses the immediate senses of sight and hearing and goes directly for the imagination. The abstract replaces the concrete. Consequently, there are no museums, no annual flood of visitors to Paris, Rome, or Athens, to celebrate the artistic beauty of a particular poem, story, or other work. Yet if we delve into the subject of beauty and the written word, we find parallels to the visible and audible arts.

The Louvre Museum is depicted in “Bonjour Paris,” 2020, by Anzhelika Doliba. Silverpoint drawing over thin casein paint layer on prepared paper; 19 inches by 24 inches. Anzhelika Doliba

Like painting, sculpture, and music, great writing depends on structure—a skeletal framework holding together words and rendering the collection a thing of beauty. Underlying the thoughts and emotions of a poem, for instance, are the forms and literary devices selected by the poet to best say what is intended.

Shakespeare’s sonnets and the lyric poetry of Emily Dickinson shape the power of their words. Dickinson’s frequent choice of the lyric, for instance, generally a short poem often decked out with common meter (alternating lines of eight and six syllables) is a primary reason that her words hit home with readers. Here’s just one example:

Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality.

In “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” Dylan Thomas’s employment of the villanelle with its repetitions and rigid form strengthens his message and makes the poem recognizable to millions:

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

At work in these verses is the know-how and soul of a master craftsman.

Tricks of the Trade

Rhetoric, that art of persuasion dating back to the Greeks, includes a toolbox of devices available to all writers for the creation of beauty in poetry and prose. Metaphor and simile, alliteration and anastrophe, chiasmus and synecdoche: All are hammers, nails, and scaffolding designed to build a mundane thought or sentence into a thing of beauty.

The opening paragraph of “A Tale of Two Cities” is familiar to many readers not only because many of them read it in high school, but also because of the tools Dickens selected from that box: antithesis, the clash of side-by-side opposites; and anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a sentence or clause. The repetitions combined with the contrasts are near-hypnotic in their effect, particularly when read aloud:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

An illustration for Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” showing the frenzy of the French Revolution. Public Domain

Sculpted Sentences

“I saw the angel in the marble,” Michelangelo said, “and carved until I set him free.” Great writers and poets attempt the same emancipation with their sentences and paragraphs.

“Moses” by Michelangelo in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome. (The horns on Moses’s head are attributed to the Latin translation of the Bible at the time of the statue’s creation.) Jörg Bittner Unna/CC BY 3.0

Sometimes the results of this desire, ardor, and skill pop up in unexpected places. In “What I Saw in America,” G.K. Chesterton noted:

“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.”

We may not have previously considered the Declaration as great literature, but the best-known sentence in this document supports Chesterton’s assertion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Here we see a marvel of sentence structure: the building of a general proposition toward the specific, the parallelism of the clauses, and the careful choice of words. In that single sentence, Thomas Jefferson created the very heart of the American Dream.

“The Declaration of Independence,” July 4, 1776, a copy of the 1823 William Stone facsimile. Public Domain

In this opening sentence from Ernest Hemingway’s short story “In Another Country,” we find a different sort of magic: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Drop the “always,” contract “did not” to “didn’t,” or correct “any more” to “anymore,” and the power of this sentence fades. Read aloud, we find it the work of a master sculptor of prose.

Beauty and the Book

Selecting an entire book as an example of artistic beauty quickly becomes personal. One reader admires the crystalline waters of a Hemingway novel, another the tangled jungle of William Faulkner, and a third the well-crafted prose of Jane Austen.

With this in mind, I’ll bring to the table two literary works that are, for me, beautiful in their entirety. The first is Mark Helprin’s “A Soldier of the Great War.” His rich prose and the fact that the novel’s hero, Alessandro Giuliani, is, among other things, a professor of aesthetics, bring beauty of some sort to every page. Even a painting, Giorgione’s “The Tempest,” is a character in this story. Here is just a sample of Helprin’s writing:

“To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.”

“The Tempest,” circa 1505, by Giorgione. Oil on canvas; 32.2 inches by 28.7 inches. Gallerie dell'Accademia. Public Domain

Several years ago, I resolved on New Year’s Eve to read in a year’s time all 11 volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization,” some 10,000 pages (depending on the edition) that weighed in on my scales at 36.6 pounds. Unlike most resolutions made over a lifetime, this one I kept, and during that climb up Mount Durant I discovered beauty I’d never expected.

The craft in the Durants’ prose—robust, Churchillian at times, and wonderfully old-fashioned by today’s standards but always eminently readable—I had neither the talent nor the temperament to emulate it, but it nonetheless fired an enormous appreciation and admiration for their work. Here, for instance, is a sentence taken at random from the volume on the Reformation: “The warm and genial south generates civilizations; the cold and hardy north repeatedly conquers the lax and lazy south, and absorbs and transforms civilization.”

These are only two of the monuments built by writers and poets. Homer’s classics, Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the King James Bible, Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books of the Western World,” and so many more: These neither stand as obelisks in a public square nor grace the walls of the Louvre. Instead, they quietly reside in our libraries and bookshops—gifts waiting to be opened, their beauty waiting to be revealed.

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