The literary critic I. A. Richards once expounded on the nature of poetry with the resounding conclusion, “Poetry is the house we live in.” T. S. Eliot piped up from the audience, “I should rather have called it the wallpaper.” That wallpaper has its poetry, in any case, was already clear enough to modernist painters like Matisse, Vuillard, and Bonnard, for whom its rhythmic patterns had at once a formal raison d’être, functioning as an approximation of what Clement Greenberg would later call the “all-over picture,” “tightly covered, evenly and heavily textured,” which “tended—but only tended—to