Jack Phillips Assignment 3

In the "Charge of the Light Brigade," Alfred Lord Tennyson sets the tone of the passage with a plethora of poetic devices, the most important of them being his allusion to the Valley of Death. This allusion is taken from the bible in Psalm 23, which is about strength in the face of certain death. Much like David in the Psalm, Tennyson sets the tone of gallantry with soldiers standing tall and fearlessly riding to their noble demise. Without this allusion, the poem becomes much darker and becomes a poem about death, not one of courage.

Jackson Pollock's quote on the variety of means that art can be expressed on is very similar to my view on art. Personally I hate it when "art snobs" look down on the works of modern artists like Banksy simply because of the medium that the artist chooses to use. Art is not static, but it is something that evolves with time, and whose meaning is never set in stone, so why do some people think that the mediums through which we can produce art should be? Just like how Alexander Pope says that the style of writing should mimic the meaning of the poem, the medium on which art appears can mimic its themes, or change them entirely. And so I have to strongly agree with Pollock that It doesn't make much difference how the pain is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a "means of arriving at a statement."