The Naked and the Nude Art and Culture Quotes

Love. Lies. Truth. Art. Graves isn't pulling his punches. Nope, he wallops us with Huge Topic after Huge Topic. But why is truth, say, so contentious? Well, perhaps it's because we have cultural norms for what gets to count as truth—or, for that matter, what gets to count as art. And don't even get us started on love. There are like seven Sex and the City seasons devoted to the cultural quirks of lovers everywhere.

Okay, so this isn't so much about culture as it is about anti-culture. That is, doctors learn to treat the body as anatomy. They're not born thinking about all the funny-sounding Latin names for bones. And along the way, they learn to un-think all the things that culture teaches us about nudity or nakedness.

Now we're getting somewhere. This is the first time that the speaker makes direct reference to art—which is sorta weird, considering that he's actually thinking a lot about a concept in its everyday and its artistic uses. But wait! Even this is, to quote our speaker, a "showman's trick." We think we're getting a description of the nude itself—after all, the language seems to suggest a 3-D form. But he's actually describing a word. Who "drapes" a word? That's some serious figurative language—about language.

Them sure is some fancy words. They point to some pretty heavy irony in this line, though. After all, we're reading about rhetoric's twisted ways in a poem. But our speaker doesn't care about details like that. He just detests bad rhetoric. And we can tell from the way he chooses an especially English-y word to describe being naked.

"Mock-religious grin / Of scorn"? That's a pretty nasty slam. But check out how Graves is actually using one cultural staple against another. Religion is okay. But mock religion seems pretty awful. And anything mock religious would be awful, too—like, say, the sort of art that glorifies a fake version of the human.

Notice how almost all the quotes about art and culture are from the middle two stanzas? That's because Graves uses stanzas 2 and 3 to lay out all the weird stuff that society does (and, okay, the cool stuff too) when it encounters folks without clothes on. And in this quote, he sums it up: naked is out. Nude is in.