by Aaron Smith

Created on: June 13, 2009

Note: The poem in the epigraph is from Robert Hass' Sun Under Wood.

The first girl's breasts I saw

were the Chevy dealer's daughter Linda Wren's.

Pale in the moonlight. Little nubbins, pink-nosed,

I can still hear the slow sound of the surf

of my breath drawing in. I think I almost fainted.

-"My Mother's Nipples," Hass 18

Why do I read these lines and think I have experienced something beautiful? I would swear up and down to any of my peers that these are beautiful words, and those peers would respond by being either moved with me or completely apathetic. Their apathy (if it came to that) would actually sting a bit, even though Robert Hass wrote the poem, not me. An apathetic response tells me that my taste is imperfect. I cannot simply look at a text, object or person, declare it to be beautiful, and be absolutely correct: some unwelcome individual will always butt in to tell me that my beautiful thing leaves them nonplussed. An easy explanation: "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." But can this explanation even possibly satisfy us? What about people whose taste is undeniably inferior? Are there any such people? Are they simply not my kind of people (meaning I should lay off), or are they actually reprehensibly stupid for not seeing beauty where I see it? These are not particularly answerable questions, as it is doubtful that there can be any definitive account of what beauty is or is not. We can however trace and attempt to understand the ways in which an individual experiences beauty. We all experience and interact with the world somewhat uniquely, but we are not the rugged individualists we might believe ourselves to be. Any tastes we have regarding a thing's beauty are in part determined by the way it interacts with our senses, and in part determined by social aesthetic values. We are creatures of context, and what people deem beautiful within that context can never be entirely universal or entirely subjective. Taste is a deeply personal sense that ultimately both determines and is determined by where we fit next to others.

A person's taste functions no differently in poetry than it does in film, music, physical appearance, or any other aesthetic subject. About four years ago I was maybe the world's

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