Art and the Artist: Sloan Warner

“Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.”  –Amy Lowell

I read the poem "The Harlem Dancer" by Claude McKay which had many connections with this quote by Amy Lowell. Though it is an incredibly short poem, 14 lines (I believe that is a couplet), it conveys this idea that art is all relative and different to every being on this earth. Just as the artist is expressing emotion when creating a work of art, the audience is pulling emotion from the piece and drawing from their own feelings to make the experience unique to each and every audience member. Some interpret works of art like it is their job, while others just look at the very basic surface of a piece of art. Neither way is a wrong way. In the poem, there is a man in a night club who sees a woman dancing on the stage. The narrator is surrounded in an environment with "wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls" (ll. 11). All of the other people in the night club are blatantly looking at the surface level of the girl and her "hotness", but the man sees something else, something totally different. Underneath all of her stage performance, he sees a miserable woman who does not want to be partaking and making a living in what she is doing. It says, "I knew her self was not in that strange place" (ll. 14) Perhaps it is because the man is looking at this situation and has something similar on his mind, such as a difficulty or issue in his life, such as the realities of living in Harlem. He is displaying his feelings onto this surface level stripper and turning it into what he feels emotionally. This perspective is most likely different from everyone else in the club, and that is why art is so interesting.