Charlie Payne Assignment 3

Love and alcohol are two ideas often associated with great poetry. A countless amount of poets have confessed their adoration for the two, whether that be in writing or in practice, but perhaps the purest manifestation of this relationship is William Butler Yeats' short poem "A Drinking Song." As striking as it is brief, "A Drinking Song" brings Yeats' existential inhibitions to the table. His tone in the poem is melancholic, but accepting. His syntax makes this immediately apparent. The use of a semicolon between the second and third lines causes the reader to pause more than they normally would when continuing to the next line, simultaneously linking the actions and ideas expressed and clearly defining them. Yeats uses a similar tactic in the last line, using a comma to break between the two mentioned actions and create a rift between love and life.

Art is an enigma, something even the people who create it haven't been able to pin down and define. However, Amy Lowell wrote that "Art is the desire of a man to express himself," and I think this comes as close to a definition as possible. Art can be created by anyone to express anything, whether they be emotions, however complex or elementary, satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the world state, or anything else falling on the spectrum of human feeling. Artists use their art to express and explain themselves to the mysterious suffering that surrounds them.