They might point to a set of conceptual priorities, such as the mind/nature dialectic in works of William Wordsworth and John Constable, or focus on a stylistic trait that seems to belong to a particular period, such as fragmenting of objects and conceptual space in both a Cubist still life and a poem like T. When comparing the handling of similar content, critics often look not only at parallels or divergences in meaning they also analyze how the artist or writer’s choice of form impacts the overall representation. 4ĤIf we look at some of the main ways that words and images emulate or imitate each other, we can better grasp the nature of these comparisons, and why they continue, after all these centuries, to offer fascinating new possibilities for writers, artists, and audiences.ĥTo begin with, poems and pictures can prompt comparison when they share the same overarching theme, such as the suffering caused by love or death, or when they treat specific but still general subjects, such as New York skyscrapers or World War I. They take note of how, particularly with the advent of Modernism, literature assumes an important spatial dimension on the page, while painting is seen, scrutinized, and understood over a period of time, as our eyes travel between and over the elements of the work. But plenty of critics since Lessing’s day have found a way to accept his insights without reaching the same conclusion.
Rather, he said, each has its own domain and method of making an impression on an audience. 2ģIn the eighteenth century the German critic Gotthold Lessing took issue with Horace and the subsequent generations of critics, poets, and artists who had agreed with him, a consensus that had led poetry and painting to be called “the sister arts.” 3 In Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing contended that the comparisons were fundamentally misguided, since literature unfolds in time and painting in space. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. For example, Horace is a poet, but he seems to give priority to visual judgment when he compares how both poetry and painting act on an audience: The contest is often uneven, as one form of presentation is temporarily favored over another. Word and ImageĢPoems spell out ideas and emotions that pictures can only show from the outside, but pictures show explicitly a visual world that poems can only lay before the eye of the mind.
1 On the one hand the Greeks created forms of sculpture and painting that have shaped our ways of seeing for millennia, while on the other hand their literature found a way to encompass that achievement through descriptive masterpieces such as Homer’s account of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad. The popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words meets its match in the ancient concept of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, wherein a whole gallery of pictures can be evoked in a few stanzas of poetic imagery. Today the phrase from Horace’s Ars Poetica is better known: Ut pictura poesis: "As is painting so is poetry." Both writers suggest an equivalence between the two arts, but audiences and critics have also seen the comparison as a sort of tug-of-war between forms of representation, wherein each strives to outdo the other by accomplishing what its rival cannot. 556–468 BC), who first said, according to Plutarch, that “poetry is a speaking picture, while painting is silent poetry.” (" Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens").
It was the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos (c. 1 The idea that we can compare poetry and painting has its roots in antiquity.
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