| THIS BOOK approaches "the
sister arts" (painting and poetry) from the side of literature; it strives
to illuminate neoclassical English poetry by using the methods of literary
history and analysis to examine the pictorial imagery of that poetry. Rather
than chase the Zeitgeist of this literary period, Hagstrum’s study
of interart parallels examines where poetic imagery comes closest into
relation with painting. Correcting a limited notion of the picturesque,
Hagstrum promises to reveal the pictorialism of English neoclassical poetry
through four approaches: 1) looking at individual poems, studied for their
pictorial images; 2) comparing particular poems with particular works of
visual art; 3) sketching the historical development of ut pictura poesis;
and 4) assessing the neoclassical poet’s use and modification of the pictorialist
tradition. Hagstrum hypothesizes that pictorial imagery is most effective
when it is in some way metaphorical rather than purely descriptive or imitative
of visual reality. He defines his most important term (pictorialism) as
a description "which must be imaginable as a painting or sculpture." Also,
the pictorial must be ordered in a picturable way; the pictorial is not
limited to one particular school of method; the pictorial in text involved
the reduction of motion; and the pictorial implies some limitation of meaning.
(Jean
Jacobson.) |