Introduction: children's art and writing

Abstract

Abstract If asked to choose a literary text which exemplifies a creative interplay between fine arts and literature, between the visual and the verbal symbol, many people would turn at once to Keats' ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The poem is a familiar classic, an assumed presence in the educated literary and artistic sensibility. Everyone ‘knows’ it. To suggest therefore that it is a poem of exceptional difficulty and complexity, and one which requires a delicate and balanced negotiation between different kinds of artistic response, different ways of organizing and structuring perception, different collocations of aesthetics and morality, may surprise readers who are used to consider it the most approachable of great poems. Yet to ask the question ‘How good an art critic is John Keats?’ may be a most effective way of focusing the themes variously approached by contributors to this issue, and of proposing their immediacy for everyone concerned with fostering an intelligent public for literature and the arts.