The Art of Travel Rheotrical Analysis

The study of any poem often begins with its imagery. Being the centralized idea behind the power of poetry, imagery isn’t always there to just give a mental picture when reading the poem, but has other purposes. Imagery can speak to the five senses using figurative language as well as help create a specific emotion that the author is trying to infuse within the poem. It helps convey a complete human experience a very minimal amount of words. In this group of poems the author uses imagery to show that humanity is characterized as lost, sorrowful and regretful, but nature is untainted by being free of mistakes and flaws and by taking time to take in its attributes it can help humans have a sense of peace, purity, and joy, as well as a sense of

Perhaps he had come to Arles for the sun and for him, it was an immense joy to live in such bright bedroom, bursting with colors. What is also fascinating about this piece of art is how the painter highlights the simplicity of his bedroom through the medium of color: « the pale lilac walls, the floor of an old brown, the chairs and bed chrome yellow, the blood red cover, the orange little table and the blue basin”, as the painter describes it. Van Gogh asserted that he wanted to express a complete rest by handling all these different shades2. The color black, which could be evocating a certain form of anguish, is almost nonexistent in this painting. Only the frame of the mirror and windows is black. We wonder if this could mean that Van Gogh was afraid of his future and afraid to face up to reality.

Beauty and sadness are also similar in the way they are recognized. Beauty, which is outside or inside has always developed and changed in the different time with different people. If the love of Gatsby for Daisy in the classis masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” used to be commented that was illusive and stupid. Then now, there are more and more people agree that it is beautiful as a lofty devotion of fidelity and intension. Clearly, standards of a beautiful love is dissimilar between the people in Gatsby’s age and people in later years. In the same fashion, standards of sadness has never “stood still” and depended enormously on its “audiences.” If most of people in the 1900s thought of the movie “Titanic” that is sad only for the tragic love of

Edmund Burke a theorist stated in his works that, "…Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime" [2] . The critic attempts to assemble an authoritative definition of the sublime here.

The quest for the ideal is a phenomenon that many people attempt to achieve. As we all know, the quest for the ideal is difficult and complicated by personal experience. The poems, “The Story” by Karen Connelly and the “The Love Song of J.Aflred Prufrock”, by T.S Elliot, as well as the essay “Kant’s Beauty and the Sublime” by Maureen Rousseau explore the peril inherent in the quest for the ideal, which is that in our search for beauty we risk encountering the sublime. The danger of the sublime is that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of the realms of things that are sublime. We ask ourselves why someone would want to risk encountering the sublime. Well, with great risk comes great reward and that is the beauty we

Art and beauty are synonymous to one another. Vocabulary.com defines art as the expression of ideas and emotions through a physical medium, like painting, sculpture, film, dance, writing, photography, or theatre. Vocabulary.com also defines beauty as “A noun depicting an incredibly pleasing or harmonious quality or feature, beauty is hard to describe.” These definitions refer to art as a definite object, physical or metaphysical while beauty is subjective. It is open to interpretation, thus implicating, that since the two are synonymous that art is also open to individual interpretation. With Elaine Scarry’s “On Beauty and Being Just” she defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us

Sublime, as the keyword that guides the two major poems, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats, has helped both authors to express their genuine feelings. The word “sublime” is used when you have a great respect and a sense of excellence for something; “Of such excellence”, the feeling of awesome. The feeling awesome has a root word of “awe”, which means the feeling of respect for fear or wonder. The word can also be used to describe the deeper understanding of beauty, beyond human understanding. Both “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, depict different aspects of sublimity. In “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, it often relates sublimity with Nature; On the other hand, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, the author of the poem demonstrates how Keats feels sublime on while reading the English translation by Chapman of Homer’s poem.

Van Gogh’s work is representational because of its realistic representation of the night sky over a

“Beauty calls with a sirens voice, and our longing to abandon all and chase after it is almost overwhelming. But we find that beauty is like the rainbow’s ends: it beckons but eludes. It’s a shimmering soap bubble that disappears in our grasping hand. In the presence of beauty we are like a child which our nose pressed to the window of a toy store. We look and yearn, but we find a barrier that prevents the full experience of what is before us. As much as we long to immerse ourselves in the beauty we see, we can’t do it.” – In Search for Certainty by Josh McDowell and Thomas Williams

In A Cottage on the Heath and “The Protestant Barn”, Vincent van Gogh used similar colors and shading to create a sense of isolation, routine, and hopelessness. This is shown by the monotonous colors, the detailed shading, and the figures in the artwork.

The first two chapters of “Theories of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann” by Moshe Barasch chronologically describe the ideas of beauty and art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Each thinker offered new insight, building off the ones before him. From this, humanity’s train of thought could be realized. As I walked through the thoughts of Antiquity to the Middle Ages, I observed a development in the way people understood and defined Beauty—a movement from the objective to the subjective to a relationship between the two. These shifts in viewpoint show the development towards, what I believe to be, a more complete understanding of Beauty, which has both external and internal qualities.

In The Fantastic Sublime, Weiskel describes the structure of the sublime as divided into three stages. The first phase is that the mind is determinate, habitual relationship with the contemplated object. The second phase is experienced by the tearing of a

Kant explains two forms of the sublime, the mathematic and the dynamic. The mathematically sublime presents itself when we are confronted with something so absolutely large that is overwhelms our imagination’s capacity to comprehend it. In this situation, the imagination, while “striving to advance to the infinite”, fails to grasp the object in accordance with reason’s demand for “absolute totality.” Instances of the mathematically sublime include towering skyscrapers, expansive mountain ranges, and the vastness of the ocean. The dynamically sublime appears when we experience nature as fearful, even though we might be in a position of safety and therefore have no reason to be afraid. The realization of nature’s power makes us, “as

When presented with rich perspectives of landscapes, individuals can develop a heightened receptivity to their milieu, fostering their ability to gain an appreciation for the beauty that encompasses the human experience. Through their engaging representations of real landscapes, composers can instill optimism into the psyche of responders, allowing them to surmount the trivialities of the detached consumer society. Alain De Botton’s intricately structured travel memoir, Art of Travel, and Margaret Atwood’s poem, The Moment, conceptualise the resonance of such landscapes through a unique and engaging form, allowing responders to cultivate an amplified admiration for their own existence.

Like the Just war theory, the sublime has been an important term in literary criticism and theory. It was first described by the Greek rhetorician known as Longinus in the text On Sublimity, which is seen ‘as one of the most influential classical works in the tradition of European criticism’ (Norton anthology of theory & criticism 133). He defines the sublime as something that ‘contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory‘ (?). He claims that there are five source of the sublime. First is ‘the power to conceive great thoughts’, second is ‘strong and inspired emotion’, thirdly ‘[c]ertain kinds of figures’, fourthly ‘[n]oble diction’ and