Painting and Poetry: Form, Metaphor, and the Language of Literature
Starting with Gertrude Stein's and Ernest Hemingway's study of Cezanne's paintings to learn there how to "write with the eyes," this work seeks the precise nature of the link between painting and poetry and explores the insights that link affords into the formation of the figurative in verbal metaphor and consequently into form in literature and the literary language.
". . . What emerges in due course [in this study] is the source of all art as metaphor, the transformation of experience, and (as Bachelard pointed out) 'a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors.' . . . This book is . . . a valuable commentary on post-structuralist criticism, although it rarely makes an issue out of it; while it shows itself to be aware of current literary theory, its mode of procedure is that of a polite and gentle difference of opinion. The climax of this process is a reading of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' which suggests that words are not (in Barthes's words) each 'a Pandora's box from which fly out all the potentialities of language' but a polysemic sign, calligraphic, taking its place within the total form. That form is volumetric, multi-dimensional . . . ." Modern Language Review, Professor J. R. Watson, University of Durham, England