Painting and Poetry

The analogy of poetry to painting is at least as old as Plato and Simonides. I'm going to look at how paintings have been used to inspire poets.

History of Western Painting

(n.b., highly selective and idiosyncratic)

Narrative
- Scenes from a life combined in one picture
- Stills from the Bible (still a feeling that if painting not about god, not meaningful)
- Portraits (first of Patrons) (as if the painting couldn't stand up for itself - poetry has to be about big issues?)
Stills
- Landscape (first from Myths (but just an empty stage?) then for their own sake)
- Still-life - (first symbol-laden - a meal table represents Gluttony). 16th century Dutch still lifes and interiors (maps on walls).
- Impressionism - Ordinary people doing ordinary things. No hidden meanings! (eye as a camera)
Imagination (a reaction to photography?)
- Expressionism - From within. Still using representationalism initially.
- Surrealism. Dada. (letting the irrational in. Expressing oneself making free use of 'reality')
Conceptual/Abstract
- Cubism (cross-cutting, multiple overlaping viewpoints)
- Non-representational - (doesn't need to 'be' anything, or even 'be about' anything - the work's an object in its own right). Paint, Op- Art, Photorealism, attention to surface.
- 'Gallery-effect' art (upside down painting. Mirror entitled 'Self Portrait')

Can all of these effects be replicated in poetry? Abstract artists can talk about the subtle contrasts of color, how the weight of a purple square offsets the subtlety of the yellow circle, but if you scrunch your eyes up, a Rembrandt has those effects too - the abstract artist has abstracted away the detail. But as people have said, with words there's only so much that can be abstracted away, and detail's hard to get rid of. A general word like "tree" might easily become anything but abstract to a receptive reader, and even "abstract" terms like Goodness have associations.

Painting and Poetry

Certain eras and schools encouraged the mixing of the 2 arts, but as far as I know, though many people have tried to do both, no-one's really succeeded.

In the Renaissance, many people, including Michelangelo, tried sonnets.
Blake, Rossetti (pre-Raphaelite)
Baudelaire-Cezanne, Cezanne-Mallarme/Zola, DH Lawrence
Paris and Surrealism - Picasso (poet), Dali (novel). Leonora Carrington a recent rediscovery. Klee (poet). The Surrealists insisted on the fundamental relations between the arts.
New York and Abstraction - "All the studies of W.C. Williams agree that he takes the analogy with painting literally and strives for an equivalency of words. Stevens' relation to painting is a far more figurative and conceptual one". Pollock, Ashbery (noted art critic). Rosenberg (was a poet then an abstract artist). Theoretical cross-fertilation. Updike.

Examples

Abstract? (Bernstein)
Casts across otherwise unavailable fields.
Makes plain. Ruffled. Is trying to
alleviate his false: invalidate. Yet all is
"to live out" by shut belief, the
various, simply succeeds which.
Surreal? (Gasgoyne)
A cluster of insane massacres turns green upon the highroad
Green as the nadir of a mystery in the closet of a dream
And a wild growth of lascivious pamphlets became a beehive
The afternoon scrambles like an asylum out of its hovel
The afternoon swallows a bucketful of chemical sorrows
And the owners of rubber pitchforks bake all their illusions

Concrete? (Brian Pastoor)

	pa  i n
	    i n
	  s i n
	   s o 
	     o
	      n
	     o

Exercises

Pick a Picture. Do a poem about it. But beware, some editors are biased.
Compare Braque's cubism (multiple merging perspectives) with Stevens' "13 ways of looking at a blackbird".
Compare de Chirico's "Dreams of a Poet" with Wendy Cope's poem.

References

"With a Poet's Eye", Pat Adams, Tate Gallery Publications, 1986?
"Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature", Wylie Sypher, (New York: Random House, 1960).
"The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting", Wendy Steiner, (Univ of Chicago Press, 1982).
"Wallace Stevens and Modern Art", Glen MacLeod, (Yale U.P., 1993).
"Painterly abstraction in Modernist American poetry", C. Altieri, CUP, 1989.
The Poet Speaks of Art
Illustrated Poetry
Image - Text - Image

Back to workshop index
Tim Love, April 1996.

tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk