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Shimon Sandbank
Comparative Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Summer, 1994), pp. 225-239.
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Mon Mar 24 16:44:48 2008
SUMMER 1994
Volume 46, Number 3
SHIMON SANDBANK
"W
COMPL4R4TIVE LITERATURE
paysans chi.tifs,-aprt.s
avoir contemple u n e nlaisonnette d'olj. rnontait u n e
n~aigrefunlee, s'ecria: "Que c'est beau! Mais que font-ils dans cette cabane? a quoi
pensent-ils, quels sont leurs chagrins? les recoltes ont-elles &ti.bonnes? ils ont sans
doute des hcheances a payer?" (579)
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
different mediums. R e n i Girard's theory of sexual rivalry, in Deceit, Desire, a?zd the lVovel, seems equally called for, perhaps even
more so, since by presenting the Other as model for imitation as
well as rival, this theory may d o more justice to the paradoxical
relation between poet and painter.' The ekphrastic poet seems to
depend o n the pregnant lacunae of art, on its infinitely intriguing
silence, just as he or she seems determined to redeem it by means
of poetic speech.
Whatever the psychology of the case, the history of the "sister
arts" certainly testifies to a less than harmonious relation between
the two. T h e transformations of the u t pictura poesis topos show
that poetry, except for some notable cases such as Leonardo's
Treatzse on E-'aznti?zg, has usually been placed above the fine arts,
mainly d u e to its capacity for direct abstraction and hence for
more explicitly and thoroughly addressing spiritual matters; thus
it is seen as having greater religious, moral, a n d philosophical
value. T h e visual arts, o n the other hand, have been shown to suffer from a number of inherent weaknesses: their limitation to visually perceptible objects, their restriction to a single moment of
time and a single place, their inaccessibility to sound a n d other
sensory phenomena, and of course their incapacity for the logical
and abstract (Markiewicz, passim).
And yet, the visual impact of painting and its iconic immediacy
and suggestive silence have always aroused the envy of poets. Even
a Romantic like Coleridge, in a period which is supposed to have
been freeing itself from pictorialism, tries over a n d over again to
sketch what he cannot describe in words. "0 Christ, it maddens
me that I am not a painter or that painters are not I," he writes in
his vote books, attempting to describe the appearance of birch trees
(1495 f.65). In our own century, the same exemption from abstract meaning, which had been considered a fault, has elevated
painting to the rank of ultimate model, and Cizanne's "thingy"
apples to the ideal at which poetry too must aim. William Carlos
Williams writes,
. . . the progression from the sentiment, the thought ( philosophy ) or the concept
to the poem itself, that was the secret meaning inside the term "transition" during
the years xvhen the painters following Cezanne began to talk of sheer paint: a
picture a matter of pigments upon a piece of cloth stretched on a frame. . . It is the
making of that step, to come over into the tactile qualities, the words themselves
beyond the mere thought expressed that distinguishes the modern of that time
The applicability of Girard's theory to the relation between poets and painters
is suggested by EIeffernan 36,n.42.
from the period before the turn of the century. And it is the reason xvhy painting
and the poem became so closely allied at that tirne. It was the work of the painters
following Ckzanne and the Irnpressionists that, critically, opened up the age of
Stein, Joyce and a good many others. It is in the taking of that step over frorn
feeling to the imaginative object, o n the cloth, on the page, that defined the term,
the rnodern term-a work of art, what it rneant to thern. ( A u t ~ b i o ~ q n p380-81)
hj
What Williams here calls the "coming over into the tactile qualities," much more natural to painting than to poetry, could only
enhance the position of painting as both model and rival. No wonder a collection of essays o n painting by twentieth-century poets
reveals as o n e of its leitmotifs poets' en\y of painters:
STEPHEN
"When they paint, painters are exercising some
SPENDER
of the qualities essential to good writing. Apart from the most obvious of these-the organizing power of the visual imaginationthey observe what Blake called 'minute particulars.' They create
images and they store memories. For all these things writers may
envy them" (J.D. McClatchy 140).
HOWARD
NE~IERO
"The
Y poet walks through the museum a n d
among so many a n d so diverse conceptions and manners of treatment he sees, he hears, especially two things: silence a n d light . . .
His own art, in the comparison, begins to s e e m . t h e merest
pitifullest chatter, c o m p o u n d e d of impatience a n d opinion"
(McClatchy 1'78-79).
ROBERT
C REELEY
"There is n o 'answer' to anything. A painter
(possibly a musician) can assert this more effectually, more relevantly, than any other 'artist.' H e can be present all at o n e time,
which n o writer can quite be-because
h e has to ' g o on"'
(McClatchy 221).
CH,SRI.ES
TOSII.INSON
"'We live in the center of a physical poetry,'
says Wallace Stevens. This is surely the basic fact which would
make a poet want to paint or, if he couldn't d o that, to comprehend the painter's way of regarding the physical poetry they both
share . . . When words seem too abstract, then I find myself painting the sea with the very thing it is composed of-water . . ."
(McClatchy 266, 268).
JAMESMERRILL
" The writer will always envy the painter. Even
those who write well a b o u t painting, h e will envy for having
learned to pay close attention to appearances" (McClatchy 312).
Minute particulars, appearances, physicality, silence, lack of answer-these, then, are some features contemporary poets find
worthy of imitation a n d envy in painting. T h o u g h randomly
COMPARATIVE LITER4TURE
Williams also puts "when Icarus fell" at the beginning of the poem,
thus making clear what he judges to be the philosophical (though
not visual) center of the picture; in addition, he presents the entire plot of the picture in the past tense, thus taking us back from
the purely perceptual present to the remembered myth and its
philosophical implications.
Thus, in the final analysis Williams too does what is inaccessible
to painting and open only to language. H e judges, ironizes, moves
in time. H e too fills out the absences of art, falling short of the
ideal (described by Merrill in the above-quoted passage) of that
"rare person who can look at anything for more than a few seconds
without turning to language for support."
T h e physical bias of much modern poetry, then, does not exempt poets from the urge to lend their visual objects the differe7ztia
specifics of the verbal. A salient case in point is Rilke. His
Dingdichtung, inspired by Ckzanne a n d Rodin, is often seen as a
heroic attempt-perhaps the heroic attempt beside Gerard Manley
Hopkins's-to subject poetic language to the physical "inscape" of
things (Hartman 95). His famous sonnet on the "Archaic Torso of
Apollo," with all its seeming glorification of a purely physical presence, insistently dismisses the physical:
W e cannot know his legendary head
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
the relation between art and poetry from the perspective of absence, or rather of two absences: of sound and of movement.
These two limitations of the visual medium are here reversed into
its triumph. It is, however, a double-edged triumph, deeply
marred by exclusion.
Silence dominates the first one-and-a-half stanzas. The urn is a
bride of quietness, a foster child of silence. It is "stilln-that is,
again, silent, or, if taken as adverb, still unravished by (one suspects) the poet, who will soon and inevitably "ravish" the urn's
"ditties of no tone" by his insistent voice. He would have preferred
to pipe to the spirit, not to the sensual ear, but is doomed to the
latter. His frantic questions concerning the illustrations on the
urn-what legend, what men, what maidens, what struggle, what
pipes-enact the verbal rape of art's silence. But they also bring
out art's impotence in comparison with speech. For it can answer
none of these questions. There is a silence in art which is not only
numinous ("Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought"), but
also infinitely sad, ever frustrating man's thirst for being "told,"
for the absent voice:
A n d , little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent b e ; and not a soul to tell
W h y thou art desolate, can e'er return.
COMPARITIVE LITERATURE
Keats's ode seems to have very little to d o with the Calvino text
from which I started. It neither begins with what the urn excludes
nor ends with its destruction. The content of the urn's decorations, o n the contrary, fills the poem and is enthusiastically asserted. O n another level, however, the poem does something not
dissimilar to Calvino's essay. Heaping stillness on quietness on silence in its first two lines, it makes the absence of voice its insistent
starting point. As it proceeds, another absence, motionlessness,
becomes the only perspective from which other figures on the urn
are perceived. T h e youth singing beneath the trees is evoked, not
as a youth singing, but as a youth who cannot leave his song. And
the same holds for the lover who can never kiss, etc. And then
comes the little town which is not there, imagined from the perspective of being ever empty, ever a non-town.
Like Calvino, Keats lets absence take over. What finally prevails
is the melody that is not heard, change that is left out, the town
that is left behind. Keats too, presumably singing a hymn to art,
reads his urn from the perspective of its omissions. But the urn is
also there. If Keats sleeps a n d dreams, he does so in the presence
of the urn, whether real o r fictitious. Ekphrastic poetry wants to
supersede art, but first needs the art it wants to supersede. There is
a double movement of attraction and supersession, dependence
and negation. I have dealt with the second half of the story only.
T h e status of the ekphrastic poem as a poem not quite self-sufficient, but calling for its completion by an external visual text, is
the other half. But this would call for another paper.
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres comnpldt~s.Vo1.2. Paris: Gallirnard, 1976. 2 vols.
Bloom, Harold. T h e Anxiptj ofInfZu~nce.Ne~uYork:O xford University Press,1973.
Calvino, Italo. "The Birds of Paolo Uccello."Trans. P.Creagh. Halpern 3-4.
Coleridge, S.T. T h e hTotebooks. Ed. K.Coburn. Vol.1. New York: Pantheon, 1957. 4
vols
Girard, Reni.. Dpc~it,Desire, and the hTovel.Baltimore a n d London: J o h n s Hopkins
University Press, 1966.
Halpern, Daniel, e d . Writers on Artists. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
H a r t m a n , Geoffrey. The C'nmediat~d Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1954.
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[Footnotes]
1
The Parallel of the Arts: Some Misgivings and a Faint Affirmation: Part 1
James D. Merriman
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 2. (Winter, 1972), pp. 153-164.
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Works Cited
Ut Pictura Poesis... A History of the Topos and the Problem
Henryk Markiewicz; Uliana Gabara
New Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 3, On Poetry. (Spring, 1987), pp. 535-558.
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The Parallel of the Arts: Some Misgivings and a Faint Affirmation: Part 1
James D. Merriman
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 2. (Winter, 1972), pp. 153-164.
Stable URL:
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NOTE: The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list.