‘Spots of time’: representation of narrative in modern poems and paintings

Abstract

Despite occasional attempts to fence off the territory between poetry (or verbal art generally) and painting, exemplified in Lessingis Laokoon, (1) the history of “the Sister Arts” delineates a continuous overlapping of pictorial poetry and narrative painting, apparent efforts to overcome what would seem to be the generic limitations imposed by the very media of the two forms. In using words and visual images symbolically to represent and generate meanings about the “real” world, humans have habitually relied upon one art form to respond to and interpret the other, using the “static” art of painting to represent narratives, and the “temporal” or “processual” art of poetry to represent a “pictorial” scene. At the same time, both poetry and painting create meanings beyond any narrow concept of representation of a world outside works of art, further complicating attempts at criticism.