Betting On The Muse

Pursuing the ideal is a central theme frequently mentioned within the three poems Sailing to Byzantium, Betting on the Muse, and Constantly Risking Absurdity and Death. While writing poetry, an artist's main objective is often to reflect on their perception of beauty depicted in either the eternal or temporal realm. Throughout the poetry unit, it became quite evident that the eternal realm is the ideal due to its expression of everlasting love and happiness with an emphasized correlation to art and preservation. With the usage of literary devices such as enjambment, metaphors, and diction, the poet’s of the three poems listed were to successfully capture and convey this pursue for the ideal within the eternal realm.

In the reputable short
The poem goes in depth mentioning the loneliness and heartache of an athlete who is no longer in the spotlight nor relevant while describing the unsavoury ending to his life and career. By comparing the career of an athlete to that of a poet, Bukowski suggests the career of a poet is superior and more practical in comparison to that of an athlete uses temporary beauty, stardom, and relevancy as evidence and key themes to support his argument as a poet's work will never decay once written. In the lines “there you are, smiling; there you are, victorious; there you are, young” (Bukowski 28-32), Bukowski begins to set a more somber tone using repetition and enjambment while emphasizing words such as smiling, victorious, and young to prove with age, athletes begin to lose the very qualities that once defined them. The very title of the poem- “Betting on the Muse” was used as a form of mockery by Bukowski using the analogy of betting to describe his choice to become a poet to go with the muse and create works of art rather than the temporal quality of