Arts and Literature
Artistic and literary works often engage with suffering, sometimes at great cost to their creators or performers. The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database offers a list of such works under the categories art, film, literature, and theater. Be it in the tragic, comic or other genres, art and literature offer means to alleviate (and perhaps also exacerbate) suffering, as argued for instance in Harold Schweizer's Suffering and the remedy of art.
This Breughel painting is among those that inspired W.H. Auden's poem Musée des Beaux Arts :
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
(...)
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; (...)
Read more about this topic: Suffering
Famous quotes containing the words arts and, arts and/or literature:
“A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Eliot dead, you saying,
“And who is left to understand my jokes?
My old Brother in the arts . . . and besides, he was a smash of
poet.””
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)