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First thing . . . I laughed so hard while reading the intro to Auden’s article that I almost passed out. I have come across some memorable quotes before in academic work, but Auden’s assertion about young people who say they want to be writers as follows, “Among these would-be writers, the majority have no marked literary gift” (379) is by far one of the most memorable things I have read, and those words will not leave me soon. I shudder to think how many dreams have been shattered upon those uncompromising rocks of his words.

Aside from the hilarity, Auden raises good points. One of the most poignant is the idea of pride in one’s work and how the mechanization of industrialization has taken that away, reducing many jobs to be just a laborer. One can take pride in being a worker, that is, one who has a viable and respectable skill and purpose, but machines have taken that away. As a worker, like a blacksmith or gunsmith, can take pride in creating something, so can an artist take pride in creating something. Pride is linked in the ability to create, whether it be swords, guns, poetry, painting, or woodworking. So I guess many of these “talentless” people want to be artists of some kind so they can create something. This thought is following Auden’s logic completely and does not reflect my own world view (at present, for I am still thinking about the implications of this new train of thought).

To continue briefly, I wish to engage Auden’s assertion that artists are their own masters. I don’t fully agree that this may be what makes being an artist universally desirable. Think about it, what you generate as an artist is going to be uniquely yours, even if you follow another template, you will still have your take on whatever you present. That is not the disagreement. What about dry spells, writers blocks, and other artistic hassles (censorship, for one)? These look to me to be internal and external factors that, while they may not completely usurp “mastery” completely from the artist, they at least offer up situations where the artist is not as much in control as (s)he would like to be. Or take into the consideration the fact that an artist may be controlled by the art s(he) produces. The artist may long for work in one genre, but constantly finds that s(he) is naturally flowing much better in a different genre. Letting art flow from you is probably the way to allow the emotions, images and other important things to flow into the art making it truly valuable. Perhaps, the attraction is that false belief that one can be a master of one’s own art.