Art history and critical perspectives

Art in poetry: "The Archaic Torso of Apollo" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

In Rainer Maria Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the poet gazes upon a ruin of the ancient world, and projects himself into the image from antiquity. He does not begin by describing the torso itself, but instead imagines the head and eyes that the statue would have had when it was whole, and sees a kind of smile in what is left of the statue's legs. The statement about art is not just that the poet must change his life as the poem proclaims at the end, but that the poet sees in the art what he wants to see, reflecting his feeling that he needs to change. The work of art is just a torso, a ruin, but in seeing this ruin the poet projects an image of the past onto the statue and resolves to change, when before he was only wandering around in an art museum. The poem is silent as to whether resolve to change comes because of the sight of beauty he has witnessed, because of a strange communion with the spirit of the god and the artist that is still alive in the statue, the greatness of the art and the ability of art to memorialize human existence -- or just the opposite, if the poet sees the ruins of the ancient world and resolves to change because of its reminder of the transient nature of human existence. The interpretation of the poem, like the speaker's interpretation of the statue, will likely depend on what he or she feels at the time about his or her own life.