Billy Mills 

Poster poems: Pen portraits

This week we're looking at painting. Come and have a look
  
  


Portrait of Calliope (detail), muse of poetry, found at Pompeii guest house. Photograph: Pasquale Sorrentino

In his 1918 review of the Imagist movement, A Retrospect, Ezra Pound discusses, amongst other things, the difference between painting a landscape and writing a poem about it. He argues that the difference is that the painter describes the landscape while the poet presents it.

It's a nice distinction, and one that you (or I) might care to argue with. However, whether or not you accept Pound's position, it does raise an interesting question about the differences between the two arts. It also raises a number of considerations regarding the whole area of those poets who write about art and artists, a group that includes Pound himself, regardless of his proscriptions.

When talking about English poets who took the world of painting as a theme, it is difficult not to begin with the ubiquitous Robert Browning. It would be possible to construct a mini Who's Who of Italian art from the painters who appear in Browning's poems, and when it comes to recommending one of his painter poems the temptation is to say "this one" and this" and "this one too". However, if I have to pick only one, it has to be this one.

Browning is far from being the only poet to write about painters and paintings; in fact it would be easy enough to assemble a good-sized anthology of the poetry of art. A few examples that came to mind while thinking about this week's challenge are Vuillard: "The Mother and Sister of the Artist" by WD Snodgrass and Perseus, a poem by Sylvia Plath based on an etching by Paul Klee. As ever, that other old favourite of mine, Marianne Moore, has her own unique take on the matter.

However, I can't write about this subject without mentioning one of my favourite paintings, The Fall of Icarus by Brueghel, a picture which inspired poems by two of the best-known 20th century poets, WH Auden and William Carlos Williams. You can adduce just about everything that differentiates the work of these two poets from the way they write about this one painting. The Williams comes from a sequence of Brueghel poems, and if you like the Icarus, it's worth reading the lot.

Of course, where the overlap between poetry and the visual arts is at its most intense is when they meet in a single artist/poet. Sometimes this happens when someone who is known primarily as a painter also writes verse. A prime example of this is Michelangelo Buonarroti. Sometimes the opposite is the case, as with Mina Loy, who is now mostly remembered as a poet but who worked on and off as a painter and designer for most of her life.

But the most interesting cases are those poet/painters who are equally well-known for their work in both art forms. Although I'm not particularly fond of either of them, I'm quite happy to admit that in the cases of both William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, their poetry and paintings illuminate each other in interesting ways. The same is true of a poet/painter whose work is more to my liking, David Jones. We can argue the relative merits of these three later, if you like.

And so, if you haven't already guessed, this week's challenge is to write a poem on the theme of a painter or painting of your choice. And when I say painting, of course I include carving, statue, print, etching, or any other visual art medium you care to think of. Pens, brushes, charcoal, crayons, chisels and keyboards at the ready? Let's go.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*