I had the same reaction. The idea that literature, because it uses words, is in second place, in the arts, in its ability to convey emotion is very startling indeed to me...
As a sort of protest, in the nature of a cri de coeur, really, I feel compelled to register just a few names here. First, a very few poets. (One definition of poetry, I don't recall whose, is "emotion recollected in tranquility.")
Gerard Manley Hopkins (a religious poet!)
William Blake
William Butler Yeats
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Philip Larkin
Sylvia Plath
William Shakespeare
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Now, a very few novelists who are masters at communicating emotion:
Charles Dickens
Marcel Proust
George Gissing
Fyodor Dostoyevski
George Eliot
Both Brontes
Gustave Flaubert
Samuel Richardson
Chinua Achebe
Franz Kafka
Willa Cather
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[BTW, the Catholic Church, in the 18th century, was so alarmed at the power of the novel to stir the emotions, that the printing or reading of novels was forbidden in Latin America for two hundred years.]
[And the elevation of architecture above literature in its ability to convey or arouse emotion is truly ideosyncratic.] |
