Speaking the silence: contemporary poems on paintings

Abstract

Abstract Although the current vogue of poems on paintings undoubtedly owes a lot to the fact that in our age of mechanical reproduction of the work of art access to the painter's work is virtually unlimited, this is an insufficient explanation for the popularity of the genre.1 If, as John Dixon Hunt speculates, paintings are for many poets ‘just like any other subject matter, resonant experiences such as reading Spinoza, falling in love or the smell of cooking and therefore apt as material for poetry’, then poems on paintings do not even have a better claim of constituting a distinct genre than poems on battles, butterflies or railway journeys.2