The Influences of Art on the World in Arthur William O’Shaughnessy's 'We Are the Music Makers' Anonymous 12th Grade

Written and published as “Ode” by Arthur William O’Shaughnessy, “We are the Music Makers” is fashioned around the central idea that artists are the real inspirers of men, and their deeds the true shapers of history and society. The ode is divided threefold into strophe, antistrophe and epode, obeying the classical Greek tradition of the choral ode. The first stanza or strophe is an exaltation of the creative temperament, a celebration of artists as “music-makers” and “dreamers of dreams.”

The poet focuses on the solitary nature of all artists: they shun the material aspects of life in their efforts to realise their dreams (“world-losers and world-forsakers”) and are in turn shunned by a society that cannot understand them. The artist is pictured as a hermit engaged in deep thought while “wandering by lone sea-breakers / And sitting by desolate streams.”

The portrait of the artist as “world-forsaker” is grounded in truth. Emily Dickinson barely left the confines of her bedroom and was loath to entertain guests; Paul Cézanne painted furiously in virtual isolation near the end of his life; Salinger withdrew from public view after the success of The Catcher in the Rye. Creative endeavours are by nature isolating, and artists must,...