There is a long tradition in artistic literature within the text containing symbolic meaning. Through referencing or representing art, the author is able to convey, and often consolidate, the ideas of the artist he or she is referring to. This might serve to reinforce a thematic point (as in WH Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"), to draw parallels between texts and thus create new narrative structures (as in James Joyce's Ulysses), or to consolidate ideas more artists of multiple genres in a single idiosyncratic text (as in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"). But what is most interesting about the metanarrative use of art within literature is the point it makes about the finiteness of art, about its limits in producing new and original thought. When referring to art in literature, a process of thought recycling is ensured and the awareness that there is no original artistic thought is reconfirmed. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "Musée des Beaux Arts" is a poem about paintings, referencing specific works of art, a common theme that runs through both the poem and the paintings: the constancy of human suffering. Regarding this theme Auden writes: “They were never wrong about suffering, The ancient masters: how well they understood its human position”.[1] It continues by exploring three paintings by the Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Younger and his father Pieter Brueghel. the Old Man. In these paintings the artists highlight moments of tragedy and cruelty, while the world continues to exist and operate as if nothing is out of place. These paintings portray suffering as an ordinary fact, not necessarily essential to human existence but an undeniable aspect of it. Suffering exists alongside the monotony of everyday life, which itself views suffering with what can best be described as ambivalence: “[suffering] happens / While someone else eats or opens a window or just walks dully.” [Auden, lines 3 - 4] Auden does little in this poem after the first three lines beyond simply providing a synopsis of the scene in each painting; it makes no original point, no insight into the nature of suffering beyond what any individual can discern by studying original works of art. What he does in poetry, however, is provide a literary interpretation of the paintings, copying a visual image into a written, literary work of art. In doing so Auden indirectly highlights one of the inevitable traps destined to hit the artist; it's all been done before. As Auden points out in the first three lines of the poem, the “Old Masters” understood suffering perfectly, in its entirety, in its complexity and constancy. It is impossible for Auden to articulate the nature of suffering any more clearly than the "Old Masters" before him did, so he instead reiterates their point in a form of artistic recycling, changing the form but not the idea. Everything that has been said about suffering has already been said hundreds of times, Auden simply demonstrates that the ways in which suffering can be represented can be original. The "Musée des Beaux Arts" shows how originality in artistic thought can now only exist in form and not in content. One of the most obvious references to a work of art within a separate literary text is James Joyce's novel Ulysses, whose title alone is a direct reference to Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey. Much like Auden, Joyce could be seen to have recycled the theme through a change of form, to look at a text that acts as a stonecornerstone of the Western canon and recreate it for his time. As Michael Palencia-Roth writes: “A myth in a modern perspective: if Odysseus were reducible to a formula, which he is not, this would be it.”[2] Once again, ideas and stories from the past are reused and presented again by the artists of the present. But, as Palencia-Roth writes, Ulysses is too vast and all-encompassing a text to be reducible to a formula, to a single interpretation; it's simply too big to be anything more than a reworking of a mythical poem. If he is not simply reinterpreting the same thematic points as Homer, then why does Joyce refer to the Odyssey so dependently? Just as Auden did with Brueghel's paintings, Joyce puts a twist on Homer's work through the introduction of contemporary methods, more specifically the stream-of-consciousness style advocated by Joyce and his modernist contemporaries. Joyce transforms the Odyssey into a psychological drama, while simultaneously consolidating the action of the poem from ten years into the span of twenty-four hours. As an example of how Joyce enriched the action of Homer's work, Odysseus' interaction with the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa is book 5 in Homer's text, while in Joyce's it is chapter 13.[3] Joyce expands Ulysses' journey into the experience of an ordinary man on an ordinary day, but maintaining similar themes through intense tracing of inner thought. The Nausicaa section of Odysseus's journey deals with the themes of fidelity, love and commitment, while chapter 13 of Ulysses provides an ironic reproduction of these themes. The chapter sees Leopold Bloom, Joyce's stand-in for Ulysses, masturbating on a lustful, public beach. after a young woman, despite her married status. While Odysseus' devotion to his wife Penelope is undeniable and drives much of the story of the Odyssey, Joyce's commitment is complicated, his sexuality entirely modern: “His hands and face worked and a tremor pervaded. He leaned far back to look up where the fireworks were and took his knee in his hands so he wouldn't fall back looking up and there was no one there to see only him and her when he revealed all his legs graceful and beautifully shaped that way, the offering soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of her heart, the breathing of her horse, for she knew the passion of such hot-blooded men.” [Joyce, pp. 355]There is no commitment between Bloom and the girl he desires and masturbates for, Gerty MacDowell, it is rather pure passion and sex. Although passion and sex are not exactly the central themes of the Odyssey, Joyce presents them as ironic twists on the original thematic focal points of Homer's text. Joyce subverts obvious thematic points to make a commentary on love and commitment, Bloom's love and commitment to his wife, Molly, who exist in much the same way as Ulysses and Penelope, but are simply complicated by the problems and realities of Twentieth. Secular life. Just like in the 'Musée des Beaux Arts', the theme and artistic thoughts between the modern work (Joyce) and the reference work (Homer) are the same, but it is the presentation of that thought that differs, that is renewed. An equally important contemporary of Joyce was the poet T. S. Eliot, whose poem "The Waste Land" is now considered an essential text to the Western literary canon. Just as in the 'Musée des Beaux Arts' and Ulysses, 'The Wasteland' incorporates thematic ideas that have existed in literature and art in general for centuries, but presents them in an entirely original form. The variety of influences, of borrowed ideas and duplicated thoughts, creates a distinctive poem with a structure and style. 452