Arts and Crafts

"Writing is not an art," a PhD student objected after reading last week's post: "it's a craft." Naturally, it depends on what you mean by "art" and what you mean by "craft".

To call scholarly writing an art is, of course, an attempt to elevate it by association with, for example, poetry. But we should remember the great effort that modernist poets made in the early twentieth century to recover their art from triviality by referring to themselves as craftsmen. We generally think of art as the pursuit of beauty and craft as the pursuit of utility. The "fine arts" make beautiful things, while our craft traditions make things we can use. It is the stylistic ideal of modernism, however, to bring these two pursuits together. "One definition of beauty," writes Ezra Pound, "is: aptness to purpose." As a poet, he traced his tradition back to the troubadours, the most famous of whom perhaps, Arnaut, was praised by Dante as "the greatest craftsman [il miglior fabbro] of the language". But it is worth keeping in mind that poetry held a much less, shall we say, decorative place in society during the twelfth century than it does today. It was very much a part of the "media" in which social life went on (they didn't have television or newspapers, of course). Poetry had a purpose, and its beauty was indeed to be apt to it.