Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: CRITICISM AND TRADITION
- GENRES
- LANGUAGE AND STYLE
- THEMES AND MOVEMENTS
- LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
- 26 Literature and philosophy
- 27 The psychology of literary creation and literary response
- 28 Taste and aesthetics
- 29 Literature and the other arts
- 30 Classical scholarship and literary criticism
- 31 Biblical scholarship and literary criticism
- 32 Science and literary criticism
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
29 - Literature and the other arts
from LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: CRITICISM AND TRADITION
- GENRES
- LANGUAGE AND STYLE
- THEMES AND MOVEMENTS
- LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES
- 26 Literature and philosophy
- 27 The psychology of literary creation and literary response
- 28 Taste and aesthetics
- 29 Literature and the other arts
- 30 Classical scholarship and literary criticism
- 31 Biblical scholarship and literary criticism
- 32 Science and literary criticism
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Ut pictura poesis
David Marshall
In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke argued that the effect of words ‘does not arise by forming pictures of the several things they would represent in the imagination’. Insisting that ‘on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty times any such picture is formed’, Burke asserts: ‘Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a very considerable part of its energy, if this were the necessary result of all description.’ As Burke's appeal to empiricism suggests, however, it was not at all uncommon in 1757 (the year the Enquiry was published) to assume that words, especially words in poems, could represent and even present pictures. Nine years later, in 1766, when Lessing set out to delineate the effects of painting and poetry in his Laocoön, he announced his intention to counteract the ‘false taste’ and ‘unfounded judgements’ that had converted Simonides' assertion that paintings were silent poems and poems were speaking pictures into a set of rules for artists and critics.
Both Lessing and Burke sought to refute different aspects of the tradition known as ut pictura poesis–those famous words that were taken out of context from Horace's Art of Poetry to stand for the belief that poetry and painting were or should be alike. Eventually arguments that disputed the power of description to produce images and the analogies between poetry and painting would lead to the undoing of this tradition; but Burke and Lessing were responding to views that had become pervasive by the second half of the eighteenth century.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 681 - 741Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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