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Manet – revealing too much about us

Manet - Olympia

The questions asked by this painting when it was first displayed are still relevant today. A naked woman, propped up on a bed with a man holding flowers behind her. Is it the look in her eyes, the searching into our morals, our ideas about nakedness, intrigue. Is it the way in which she sits unmoving, unemotionally knowing that her body is beautiful, an object of desire and demand. Is it because there is no artistic ambiguity, she is so immediate, there is nothing to distract us from her nakedness, and our response to her nakedness. Or is it because she shows no desire for the male viewer. We may want her body, but she has no interest, she is beyond us, beyond any suggestion that anything we can do to her, we can in no way interest or satisfy her.

The Love Song

T.S. Eliot - The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

When I first read this poem I was eighteen, at university, starting out on a degree in English literature. 20th century American poetry was a highlight for an eighteen year old, the lives and the poetry, the casting aside of tradition, of form and expression, of seeking a new way of saying something, of even endeavouring to say something new, to take literature on a new path.

I read this poem once and instantly knew that it was going to take sometime to get inside the words, the spirit of the poetry. And indeed it did. I sat at a bus stop waiting for a late bus one Friday night and read the poem over a dozen times (the bus must have been late), and just as the headlights of the bus turned the corner, I finally grasped what T.S. Eliot was on about.