Why Art Has to Last

by allison huang, editorial intern

It’s early acceptance season, and I’m a junior watching what fall will be like next year when I step into the shoes of former seniors. I am nervous, but excited. Being as religious as I am, I know that I will have a secure future. That isn’t the problem.

The problem is whether I will be rejected and end up attributing rejection to the fact that I chose to pursue poetry rather than scientific research, art rather than something more “useful,” something more relevant in a commercial, capitalist society. The problem is that I will “lose the magic” because of that inherent, nagging feeling that the humanities won’t get me into a top school; I will forget why I am writing poetry in the first place.

I was somewhat reassured when I read an article on Harvard’s website, Valuing the Creative & Reflective. Long story short, the arts deserve greater recognition for standing the test of time, and colleges should be doing more to encourage artists to continue the work that they do. Poetry is a dying industry outside of loyal literary circles. Yet there are those that choose it despite having nothing to fall back on (Ocean Vuong, homeless for most of the time he was in school). With all the possible failure and setbacks, what is so alluring about the arts?

According to Harvard, we continue to look back on Walt Whitman, but scorn Freeman-Watts. Meaning, scientific advancements quickly grow obscure and archaic, but art holds real human experience, and that is precious, and timeless. I would like to add, in the words of my School Headmaster, that poetry is the tool of bellwethers. When we look back on works of art, we see artists accurately, even unconsciously, predicting the outcomes of contingent events, because art draws from the source of human connection. Wartime poetry is a great example of this.

I am a big advocate of conflict resolution, and it becomes more relevant as more people are now thinking about what peace means to them, having been affected by events like the Syrian Refugee Crisis and the operations of Daesh. Art becomes even more precious when we realize that one of its greatest purposes is to bridge disparate human experiences by sourcing back to and illuminating human roots of emotion and inherent values of life, liberty, happiness, etc. Anyone can connect on the basis of art, language, poetry. This becomes more important as we evaluate what values mean to us, and what those things mean when it comes to our treatment of other people.

We’ve become such an automatic society, and I believe it is in direct correlation with a diminishing esteem for the arts. People are forgetting the real purpose of existence, which is not wealth, cars, material gain, false security. It is human connection, love for the fellow man. If we want to keep up in a rapidly globalizing society, we cannot turn inward. And if we want to find the bridge to human connection, we will find it in the poem and the pen, not the petri dish.[endif][if !supportAnnotations][endif]

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