“Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world 

A little overgrown, (I think there is)                                

Their sole work is to represent the age,                            

Their age, not Charlemagne’s, — this live, throbbing age,      

That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,                      

And spends more passion, more heroic heat,                                      

Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,                                

Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.”

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh

 

As I was reading Aurora Leigh over the summer, this quote really struck me. It says something very important about what a writer is supposed to do. Writers aren’t meant to look back and harp on a time long gone; they are meant to represent their own age with all its faults and triumphs.

Today’s world is a complicated place; it’s not all pretty, and nothing can be said for everyone. No one writer can represent everyone, but in a small way, they can represent one perspective on the modern world. As a writer, I want to use my voice to show “this live, throbbing age” from my own cultural perspective. I want to write with honesty and passion about the fascinating people of my time.

The writers of today should paint the world as they see it, not as it was seen hundreds of years ago. This age is just as artistic and beautiful as any other, and a writer has the opportunity to shed light on that and define what their culture and the culture of the modern world really means. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is absolutely right about what a writer’s job is; a hundred years from now, writing should shed light on what our world is, what we value, what we believe, how we interact. And if the writer is honest, people a hundred years from now will understand what they have written and will see how humanity at its core doesn’t really change much even when the setting is entirely altered.