ESP.LITERATURE

The road less traveled by has always been my chosen path. Literature certainly is a grassy path that wants wear. I use the word in a modern (hairsplitting?) sense. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1979, has, for its second entry, that ‘literature is a literary work or production.’ Any written work or production, it seems, might be labeled literature. Entry three, however, adds a proviso: … in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect.

I was looking for something more objective, but perhaps the OED definitions will serve as we look down the path as far as we might to where the undergrowth overwhelms.

What I wish to avoid is the cliché ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,’ and its application to the written word. Can flash fiction be literature? Anime? Comic books? The OED’s 3rd  definition suggests that these genres do not quite cut the mustard which is not to say, I hasten to add, that they do not have value.

John Donne’s prose poem Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) is literature. His use of metaphor, poetic prose, universal themes, and the structure of the work all combine to elevate what began as a devotional poem, as common in the 17th century as romance novels are today, to a loftier plain creating a work of art with the requisite components of beauty of form and compelling emotional effect.

Two phrases from ‘Meditation XVII’ have become iconic expressions:

No man is an island.

For whom the bell tolls.

The last phrase deserves a full rendering, I think, and captures in its few words the essence of literature:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.