![]() William Blake, ‘The House of Death’ (c.1795) Even Blake does not brood on the two arts of which he is master, or not as rivals or Siamese twins. Painting needn’t envy, painters seem to feel, still less try to borrow, what belongs to another way of world-making. No doubt many painters appreciate that poetry has to do with some kind of special balance, or imbalance, between the materiality of meaningful sound and the intensity of whatever it is (the state of affairs, the realm of feeling) the sound means to materialise. They do not set themselves to wondering in visual terms what poetry really is – what marks it off from depiction. Depictions with poetic starting points, that is, are not necessarily concerned with the ‘poetic’, or even the linguistic. There is no shortage of paintings derived from verse, often importing material (even mood and atmosphere) directly from the text – ut pictura poesis was always meant to work in two directions – but there don’t seem to be many paintings that are ‘about’ the poem that sparked them in the same way that a good poem is about the painting in front of it. ![]() Why then, conversely, are not paintings drawn from Paradise Lost or Marino Faliero driven by a similar effort at mimicry, or intimation at least, of Milton’s or Byron’s extraordinary diction? Silence and self-evidence make a space for language a painting’s semantics of juxtaposition and interval, the poet says, may trigger a kind of syntax no one has tried before the all-at-onceness of the image is an incitement to prosody. Isn’t what Bruegel and Velázquez did untranslatable? Surely painters are bent on communicating things – ideas, experiences – that words will never touch? But precisely that fact is the spur to poetry. Poems about paintings most often circle round the ‘about’ in the exercise, and are fired by an awareness of how strange it is even to want to transpose the procedures, the effects, of one art into another. Or only in ways that miss the main point. T he world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible. Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ ![]() ![]() Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time. Well, I could never write a verse, – could you? ![]()
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