POETRY AND PAINTING

Painters no longer paint with paint except in the sense that poets write with ink. Paint is now only a more expensive, elegant ink. What do painters paint with, then? They paint with poetry. A picture is a poem in which the sense has been absorbed by the medium of communication of sense. It is not an intelligible series of hieroglyphics, but the poem itself forced into a kind of outrageous, unnatural visibility: as if suddenly the thing mind were caught in the hand and made to appear painfully and horribly as a creature. The development of painting is toward this poetic quality; the better (the more literal, the less realistic) it gets, the more horrible. So much for the so-called abstractness of painting: the sense is made identical with the medium by forcibly marrying it to the medium. Medium and sense are a legally fictitious One in which the medium, the masculine factor, forces the sense, the feminine factor, to bear his name and do honour to his bed and table. She is all meek, hopeless amicability, he is all blustering, good-humoured cynicism.

This poetic progress of painting influences the pictorial progress of poetry. There is a great response in modern poetry to the demand by painters that it should be more poetic. See for yourself how many of the newest poems have not their names lettered in aluminium on their doors, with a knocker designed by the latest French abstract sculptor (master also of golf), humanly visible furniture within (all primary colours), and nobody home.