One of the constants of my personality from early childhood until well into adulthood has been my utter inability to appreciate art of any kind. I would look at a painting or sculpture or photograph or listen to music or poetry and get nothing out of it. My sister has on many occasions characterized me as a philistine. She may be right; after all, I didn’t get No Country For Old Men at all, but Paul Verhoven’s blasphemous theatric interpretation of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers entertained me.

As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve started to develop what could only be described as an aesthetic sense. It started with music, which I began to really appreciate in my early 20s (reasonable people can argue the quality of my taste in music, but prior to its emergence, I didn’t listen to any at all, which is surely as tasteless as one can get). Over time I’ve tried to explore other artistic media, sampling major works in photography, literature, poetry, and paintings. None of them really stuck.

Then, gradually, something changed. I first noticed it when I happened to read some Rudyard Kipling in an old book that belonged to my grandfather. When I read The Danegeld, I was shocked to discover the aesthetic virtues of poetry which had previously escaped me. Not even The Teaching Company’s How To Read And Understand Poetry was able to convince me of the artistic quality of the poem, but the mechanical precision of Kipling’s verse really resonated with me.

Next, I happened to run across The Gods Of The Copybook Headings. For the first time I was able to see past the literal words of a poem, and understand what the author was actually saying. More significantly, though, I was able to appreciate the value of using poetic allusion in lieu of unambiguous prose. I don’t know if this was just an indicator of my maturing brain or was stimulated by the distinctive Kipling style, but either way I’m glad it’s happened.

I’m aware of the ambivalence with which Kipling is regarded in modern poetry circles. The PC enforcers seem to dislike the implications of works like The White Man’s Burden, and I’ve read elsewhere that Kipling’s rigid, mechanistic verse doesn’t appeal to some. However, in my case, when I read Dante’s Inferno or Thoreau’s Walden, I don’t get it. I don’t get the rhythm, I don’t get the point, and I don’t see the artistic value. Maybe that means I have simplistic taste in poetry. I don’t know, nor do I particularly care.

Concurrent with my poetic awakening, I’ve found at least one Renaissance painting which has actually moved me. I first learned of Mantegna’s Lamentation of the Dead Christ in a Wall Street Journal article on the piece. The more I look at it the more I like it. For Christmas last year Rebecca commissioned a reproduction of the piece, which when complete will hang in my house.

I’m certainly in no danger of becoming an art snob, and for the most part I see no value in the vast majority of “artistic” works, but at the very least I’m now able to understand what it is to appreciate an artistic work absent any practical value considerations, which must be a positive development.