WORDS AND PICTURES: NOTES ON ALEXANDER POPE AND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
MEYER SCHAPIRO HAS POINTED out an interesting relationship between words and pictures:
. . . a great part of visual art in Europe from late antiquity to the 18th century represents subjects taken from a written text. The painter and sculptor had the task of translating the word—religious, historic, poetic—into a visual image. It is true that many artists did not consult the text but copied an existing illustration either closely or with some change. But for us today the intelligibility of that copy, as of the original, rests finally on its correspondence to a known text through the recognizable forms of the pictured objects and actions signified by the words. The picture, we assume further, corresponds to the concept or memory image associated with the words. . . . That correspondence of word and picture is often problematic and may be surprisingly vague.
In fact, the history of Western art corresponds well with Schapiro’s description. Certain “formalist” critics would demur, pointing to those elements in painting and sculpture which rely for their essential quality and strength on purely esthetic forms and surfaces; such “abstract” elements constitute the logic of a variety of schools and styles in art’s developing history. It has, however, been relatively comfortable for us to accept a formalist view, since much of 20th-century painting and sculpture has been abstract, with little or no reference to recognizable images, and seemingly no reliance on texts.
A Marxist analysis of the slow evolution of “realism” in the Western world would point to centuries of reliance on signs and symbols, the currency of myth, and would relate this reliance to the slow development of the sciences. Depiction of the material environment would tend, accordingly, to be incomplete or naive. Thus a 14th-century herbal is usually quite vague about the actual structures of flowers, plants, trees—and at best presents signs for what is being demonstrated. This is equally the case, with notable exceptions, in the depiction of landscapes, bodies of water, the skies, most forms of fauna.
The artists’ reliance on Biblical texts and legends was often the result of fragmentary knowledge and understanding of the sentient world. This history contrasts dramatically with the density of China’s artistic achievement, which parallels a remarkably sophisticated body of scientific information, developed over several thousand years, according to the great historian of science, Joseph Needham. Western Europe was far behind, not only in engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics and astronomy, but in the natural sciences as well. The rediscovery of the human body by the humanists of the Renaissance coincided with the recovery of classical texts. Yet Renaissance figure painting and sculpture, despite the camera obscura and perspective, continued to rely on such concepts as Schapiro’s “memory image associated with words.”
The shift began in 17th-century Holland, particularly in the work of Rembrandt, with his genius for observation. Then, in the 18th century French artists examined exterior reality with an amazing thoroughness. We can easily observe this shift in their fresh, often novel, attitude towards nature. What had begun in 17th-century Holland, particularly with Rembrandt’s all enveloping theme and use of massive techniques in every medium and subject, French artists continued. Watteau, Chardin, Greuze, Boucher, David and many others of the highest talent became absorbed by the natural world. The period is evoked in a phrase uttered by Watteau’s friend Gersaint: “le tout étoit fait d’après nature” (everything comes from nature). Even in the early 18th century the Academician Antoine Coypel, nodding respectfully to the Antique, gives still more emphasis to the natural world, claiming in a lecture before the Academie Royale that ” . . . il faut joindre aux solides et sublimes beautez de l’Antique, les récherches, la variété, naiveté, et l’âme de la nature” (we must connect research, variety, truth, naivete and the soul of nature, to the vigorous and sublime beauty of the Antique). Much that had been painted previously was inspired by Rubens (Rubénisme), but Gersaint was perfectly sincere when he praised Watteau’s drawings and studies that were keen observations of flora, fauna, sky, earth, people. Watteau would have agreed with Alexander Pope that the study of nature was “at once the source, the end and test of art.”1
It would be myopic to contend that poets, before the 17th century had not observed nature with appreciative eyes. Obviously, endless examples could be cited of images and metaphors in which poets descry some of the subtlest aspects of creatures furred and feathered, of landscapes cragged or waters foaming. Despite such sensibility—even in the exquisite lines of Virgil, Dante, or Milton—the world remained only a mirror for Man, a place in which to find himself, or herself. To observe the world while excluding the self had become the province of scientists and artists. Could the heavens ever look the same after Tycho and Cassini? Or the plants and flowers, after Linnaeus? Could the world ever be experienced in the same way after Newton’s beautiful theory of the laws of motion? It is now thought in some quarters, that a large part of philosophy from Plato to the Existentialists is largely a form of game playing, composed, perhaps, of elaborate verbal patterns; the reason many poets have been attracted to these labyrinths. And isn’t it possible that one reason poets began to turn to the visible and natural world as another possibility for creating art was the extraordinary eruption of science in the West in the 17th and 18th centuries? Visual artists were quicker to follow the ideas and achievements of the scientists as so many of them were commissioned to collaborate in map-making, engraving, constructing laboratory equipment, the engineering of buildings, and roads, and canals, designing ships, laying out gardens, fabricating furniture; the exterior world was willy-nilly being “illustrated.” The interior world of the poets, guarded by books, the dim quiet of library and study—was broken into by pictures. Nature was opening itself to them by means of a carom shot. The next move for poets was to step into the fresh air, to say good-bye, according to Alfred North Whitehead, to “the symbolic embodiment of generalizations to reflect a given aspect of experience.”
What Alexander Pope “saw” in painting, sculpture and architecture was what he absorbed into his own art—what was termed the “picturesque.” By experiencing art, he was able to expand his innate alertness into the visual world. Here is a pheasant:
Ah! what avail his glossie, varying Dyes,
His Purple Crest, and Scarlet-circled Eyes,
The Vivid Green his shining Plumes unfold;
His painted Wings, and Breast that flames with Gold?
And here are fish:
The bright-ey’d Perch with Fins of Tyrian Dye,
The silver Eel, in shining Volumes roll’d,
The yellow Carp, in Scales bedrop’d with Gold,
Swift trouts, diversify’d with Crimson Stains.
Windsor Forest and “Eloise to Abelard” were praised even in the 18th century for their “pictorialism.” It is obvious that a poem is not a picture and that images are there to carry the drama or the passions. Pope’s own remark is to the point: “He best can paint ’em, who shall feel ’em most.” The word feel points to experiencing; to experience nature directly is to accumulate material for poetry. Fully aware of this need to “see,” Pope was not too proud or arrogant, despite his lofty position as a gentleman, to study painting and drawing with the artist Charles Jervas. It was the beginning of a long interest and connoisseurship in sculpture, architecture and (Pope’s final achievements) landscape architecture and gardening;—his masterpiece, of course, being the splendidly designed country villa Twickenham.
The dependence of artists upon texts—again quoting Schapiro “religious, historical, poetic”—became increasingly ambiguous after the 18th century. On the other hand, who but Pope inspired the new movement in English poetry called Romanticism? Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, even Tennyson could not have been unaware of the ground breaking which had already been apparent in Windsor Forest. The English painters—Bonington, Richard Wilson, Constable, above all Turner—had their spiritual beginnings in Pope’s dictum that nature was “at once the source, the end and test of art.” But weren’t these painters also aware of the visual splendors contained in the poetry of the Romantics?
Throughout the second half of the 19th century in France, the development of an art independent of texts seems, at least on the surface, demonstrable. Cézanne, the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the Fauves, certainly the Cubists, seem to have divorced themselves from literature. And the subsequent history of 20th-century art would apparently indicate not only a divorce from literature but a total rejection of recognizable imagery on the part of many artists. One hastily adds “apparently”; the truth is that artists became interested in other kinds of ideas—philosophical, scientific, political. Courbet was a convinced Socialist, Seurat fascinated by optics; many artists were bemused by developments in photography, others by the chemical properties of color, still others by developments in astronomy and mathematics. (This does not exclude the curious interest many 20th-century painters had in texts by eccentric philosophers and pseudoscientific theologians.) What is perhaps of greatest interest to us is in what ways visual art continued to engage the attention of poets. On the cover of the catalogue to the Whitney Museum’s exhibition “William Carlos Williams and the American Scene 1920–1940”, (1978), excellently curated by Dickson Tashjian, are five lines from one of Williams’ poems:
Everything
is a picture
to the employing eye
that feeds restlessly to
find peace.2
Indeed, before turning seriously to the writing of poetry, Williams had painted pictures, first while in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and then for a while after he had begun to practice medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey. At the age of 31, however, Williams’ life as a poet was launched. “Had it not been that it was easier to transport a manuscript than a wet canvas, the balance might have been tilted the other way,” he once said. The Self-Portrait, of 1914, indicates that Williams never would have been anything more that a “Sunday painter”—not unlike Alexander Pope’s similar attempt at self-portraiture. Yet both poets reveal an understanding of what a painting is; neither’s effort is ridiculous or boring.
Oscar Wilde’s charming remark that nature always imitates art has an element of truth in it. Real sunsets do look like Turner’s, mountains like Caspar David Friedrich’s, Rome like Corot’s, crowds like Saul Steinberg’s. Horses tend to resemble the inventions of Géricault and Degas. All of us experience this strange turnabout; and when we look at nature’s sunsets, mountains or trees we see them in a fresh, more detailed way, even as Audubon’s bird plates become the greatest of guides for bird watching, and Da Vinci’s waves the turbulence of every shore.
Williams—like most of us who care to apprehend the world objectively, knowing as we do that getting out of the Self is a form of grace—welcomed the chance to exercise all his senses. Moreover, when asked by the editors of The Little Review in 1929 what he considered his strongest characteristic, he answered, “My sight. I like most my ability to be drunk with a sudden realization of value in things others never notice.” Although Williams had stopped painting, his eye had been trained to “notice.”
There is a deeper reason why Pope and Williams recognized wider cultural implications in the visual arts. When language becomes too abstract it is invariably brought back to meaning by poets who are expert at removing fatty tissue from words. (Auden once declared that if poetry had any practical value, it was as the continual rescuer of the English language.) Much of the verse written towards the close of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, was blurred with high feelings and noble ideals. The subsequent Imagist movement in poetry intended to reform language—to make it lean and visual; Williams was one of this group. Notice how Williams notices:
that brilliant field
of rain wet orange
blanketed
by the red grass
and oil green bayberry
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell has commented that “Williams’ knowledge of plants and animals, our brothers and sisters in the world, is surprising in its range and intensity. . . . ” Yet it was as difficult to be a poet as it was to be a painter in the cultural backwater that was America before World War I. The serious artist was isolated, and few felt this as keenly as Dr. Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey. Luckily, he was restless and too filled with curiosity to remain in the corral of provincialism.
Williams went to see what was going on in the galleries of New York and later met many of the émigrés from France who had participated in the famous 1913 Armory Show—for instance, Duchamp, Picabia and the back-and-forth American Parisian, Man Ray. He frequented the galleries of Stieglitz, Marius De Zayas, Charles Montross, Charles Daniel, Edith Halpert and Julien Levy. More important, he was able to follow the great European movements through the exhibitions and lectures at the Société Anonyme of Katherine S. Dreier, the Whitney Studio Club, the Museum of Modern Art and Albert Gallatin’s collection of modern art. He is clear about the way he was reacting to the European avant-garde; an exhortation to himself on a prescription slip reads “French Painting and Modern Writing.” In a letter to the historian Wayne Andrews he explained “The French poets have had no influence on me whatever. . . . I have, however, been influenced by French painting and the French spirit. . . .” Williams was anticipating what would happen to art in America when some of the most gifted of European artists came to live in exile in New York just before and during World War II. Painting and sculpture were changed radically and, freed from regionalism and parochial narrowness, entered the international arena.
Just how clearly Williams was able to “see” is finely demonstrated in a prose piece called “A Matisse” (1921). The painting in question was The Blue Nude. “Facing it,” Williams wrote,” realizing that it is pigment on surface, French painting went as far as Braque, it became a surface of paint and that is what is represented.” Williams had come to feel that words, too, must be arranged like pigment on a surface—but, unlike Gertrude Stein, Williams wished to retain for himself the autonomy of words and to include his own uniquely American experience. In an early poem, “The Rose,” he breaks up the image, rearranges it, extends the space around it as in a Cubist painting:
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air—The edge
cuts without cutting
meets—nothing—renews
itself in metal or porcelain
whither? It ends—
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry—
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica—
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses— . . .
And in the final stanza:
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space.3
Such sharpness of vision became the characteristic mode of Williams’ verse, even as the quality of presence in an abstract painting heightens our sense of what is before us in the real world. (This is particularly true of the New York painters, who had subsumed the lessons taught by the Cubists and imitated the Surrealists’ passion for liberty.) The rose as an image had indeed become “obsolete,” poeticized out of existence; it is Williams’ “surface” that restores the overly romanticized flower to what it is, rather than what it suggests.
The discoveries of William Carlos Williams happily did not end with him. Another group of poets—perhaps taking heart from the example of Williams—found inspiration in the new American painters and sculptors. Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, all writing in the early 1950s, saturated themselves in the work of their contemporaries, both abstract and representational—Pollock, de Kooning, Kline; Rivers, Freilicher, Porter.4 Poet-painter collaborations—long an established practice in European art centers—occurred in galleries, special editions and magazines. (One of the powerful side effects of this was the revival of printmaking, tentative in the ’50s, widespread in the two decades following.) By the late 1960s, however, words had stopped coming from pictures; the reverse, words into pictures, became the order of the day. And this resulted in a proliferating, easily understood “literary” art for general consumption.5 The texts—chosen from comic books, advertisements, TV dialogue, political slogans, science fiction—created a large audience for an art quite properly called Pop.
John Bernard Myers is the editor of Parenthèse, and the author of the forthcoming Tracking The Marvelous.
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NOTES
1. All quotes from Alexander Pope from: Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.)
2. All quotes from Wiliam Carlos Williams from: Everything/is a picture/to the employing eye/that feeds restlessly to/find peace. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978.)
3. I am grateful to the poet John Hollander for pointing out the Cubist structure of “The Rose.”
4. These poets did not adhere to the practice of writing poems.with pictures. All of their later work branches into other themes and experiences.
5. One important exception to this trend is the remarkable “literary” paintings of Cy Twombly, whose conception of words is organically subsumed in each painting. Sometimes one splendid, visible word reveals the spirit of the whole poem, as in his “Fifty Days at Ilium” series.
