Painting and Poetry

Poets almost inevitably reflect painterly ideas and ideals, and methods and processes in their work. Painters too almost inevitably reflect the principles of poetry—metaphor, narrative, symbolism, and so forth. At a conference at Washington University in St. Louis in 1997, on the relationship between poetry and painting, Derek Walcott said: “When we look at paintings that do not attempt to mimic the page, but make something more than just calligraphy, there is an echo that goes with that painting. The echo need not be the linear representation of an idea, like a piece of prose, or fiction painted, or even a poem painted, but some other echo that it creates.”...