Poets As Art Critics

...The jacket bears a handsome print of David Hockney's homage to Picasso, The Blue Guitar No...

...The series' title and inspiration derive from a poem by Bishop Berkeley imagining the artistic development of the New World, which predicts that "Time's noblest offspring is the last...

...Whenever we look at a painting, we are made to notice patterns that surround us constantly without our registering them...

...Ted Hughes, noting Leonard Baskin's rabbinical education, points out that his " style springs from Hebrew script itself— all those Alephs, Bets, Lameds, Yods, crammed in a basketry of nerves, growing heads, tails, feelers, hair, mouths...

...Ted Hughes concerns himself with Leonard Baskin, who has illustrated many of Hughes' books...

...Eight color plates show some works in detail...

...McClatchy's Preface puts forward the idea that 20th-century verse was "invented" by trends in art...

...his famous poem on painting, "Musée des Beaux Arts," does not describe a real Brueghel picture but a composite of several, poorly recalled...

...Draped with countless layers of pietistic imagery, The Thinker stands for all the graven images Modernism hoped to overthrow...

...Despite the culminating label, the canvas that bears it retains the same hopefulness, the same promise of rebirth suggested in the first one in the series...

...Not for nothing does McClatchy begin his precede to Yeats' essay with that poet's dictum from 1913: "We are becoming interested in expression in its first phase of energy, when all the arts play like children...

...Many of the poets included have had close ties with the art world...

...Lawrence, e.e...

...The verb "play" here clearly has connotations not only of music but of juvenile make-believe...

...Artists still pay heed to these forms, and sometimes include letters as part of a painting...

...Frank O'Hara acted as a curator for New York's Museum of Modern Art...

...Between the tension of past and future, we are reminded, the arts renew themselves again and again...

...From the Impressionist school Pound derived Imagism, from the Cubists, Vorticism...

...The use of architecture to represent human society may be European, but this allegory of trees, bluffs, rivers, and above all the breathtaking skies, is purely American...

...Fittingly, Hollander winds things up with his magnificent study of Thomas Cole's five-painting cycle...

...Gertrude Stein and Elizabeth Bishop, like Wallace Stevens, collected paintings...

...Visually, the book is as interesting and attractive as its contents...

...Even our modern alphabets preserve outlines of real things seen in nature: rivers, trees, flying birds, the shape of the human face, etc...

...Howard goes on to reconstruct for us "the last great artist for whom art, nature and religion are identical," acreator who "was faithful to what Pater calls the culture, the administration of the visible world...

...James Schuyler discusses Jane Freilicher, for whom he has modeled...

...Yet the reactions of the overeducated, of those who know all about art but don't know what they like, can sound even more preposterous...

...Anyone who has overheard people standing in front of a sublime Rembrandt or Turner talking only about brush techniques, or poor souls heaping praise on meticulous oil reproductions of soup can labels can attest to this...

...asks Stevens in the poem, adducing "The moments when we choose to play/The imagined pine, the imagined jay...

...Perhaps this awareness contributed to Frank O'Hara's reluctance simply to come and call Jackson Pollock "spontaneous"—evidently he felt he first had to placePollock firmly within the grand tradition by comparing one canvas to Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera, another to Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa...

...Yet, as Howard Nemerov reminds us, letters developed late in human history...

...Not surprisingly, the essay by Auden included here amounts to a review of Van Gogh's letters to the painter's brother...

...Once upon a time, of course, there was not much of a gap between writing and visual images—witness pictographs and hieroglyphs...

...Minerals, plants, the liquids of the body even to the blood, all gave up their substance many thousand years ago to the representation by signs of perceptions based upon fear, desire, hunger dreams, and a certain decorative geometrizing distance from all these...

...Come an' look at this girl standin' wi' no clothes on, an' two blokes spittin' at 'er...

...What is there in life except one's ideas...

...At the beginning of the century, poets rashly called for brand-new ways of seeing...

...Surely the painter's language has the dignity of being the oldest ever written down...

...or " My five-year-old could paint better than that...

...Surely the most provocative discussion in Poets on Painting is Richard Howard's "Fragments of a Rodin...

...This describes a 1970 act of vandalism in which The Thinker was dynamited off its pedestal outside Cleveland's museum: "Legs torn open, buttocks fused, the wonderful patina even more spectacular where the metal is gashed and split, a slender steel palisade boxing in the unbalanced torso—it looks like a 'modern' statement now, something closer to a Reg Butler humanoid impaled on its thorns or a realization in the seething bronze of one of Francis Bacon's horrors...

...Broad patches of Fauvist color, Matisse's dancing shapes, and Primitivism are not identical to your child's scribblings, but they are intended to capture something of the same creative exuberance...

...McClatchy editorializes by following Jarrell's diatribe with O'Hara's spirited defense of Pollock's iconography and use of mythological symbols...

...What would happen if we settled for sending poets to museums to put into words why the rest of us, unschooled in art criticism and semi-articulate in description, enjoy looking at pictures...

...Similarly, there is a sense of childlike fun in Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow" or Stevens' "Bantams in Pinewoods" that would be inconceivable in a Victorian poem...

...cummings and Charles Tomlinson were also painters, while Yeats was the only non-visual artist in his family...

...In reading both one is uncomfortably reminded that Fascism and early Bolshevism also derided sophisticated tradition in the name of folk art...

...than to the celebrated figure created in 1879 and crouching, as we all know, before so many museums, colleges and courthouses across the country...

...Ezra Pound lauds Wyndham Lewis, his collaborator in founding Vorticism...

...One instantly thinks of the all-toofamiliar comments shrieked by gallery-going philistines: "Doesn't it look real...

...Gertrude Stein, though, suggests that the intentions of poet and painter are less similar than either supposes, and that consequently "a painter cannot really write and a writer cannot really paint, even fairly badly...

...Howard surmises that the violence represented a blow against the supreme bourgeois symbol of What Art Ought To Be...

...Some such idea must have inspired J.D...

...These mammoth landscapes by the founder of the 19th-century's Hudson River School ostensibly portray stages of civilization's growth and decay, from the "savage," through "pastoral," "consummation," and "destruction," to "desolation...

...Early Modernism's appeal to basic instinct, to primary reaction could, at times, turn nasty...

...Randall Jarrell's "Against Abstract Art," though funny and ingenious, is finally a sophisticated version of "a chimpanzee could have painted that," with Jackson Pollock as the target...

...now, having been buffeted by eight decades of unimaginable surprises, their heirs are attempting to rebuild the bridges that once made for a more orderly transition...

...It gets as ripe as D.H...

...The Course of Empire, which hangs in t he New-York Historical Society...

...McClatchy has dedicated his book to John Hollander and the sculptor Natalie Charkow, Hollander's wife...

...Auden possessed what McClatchy terms "a tin eye...

...It is the rare person," says James Merrill, "who can look at anything for more than a few seconds without turning to language for support, so little does he believe his eyes...

...Whenever some manned expedition blasts into space, commentators lament the absence of a poet on board to describe to the rest of us what it really looks like out there...

...Lawrence's parody of a Cockney gaping at Botticelli's Birth of Venus: "Eh, Jack...

...John Ashbery has written art criticism, most recently for Newsweek...

...A Wallace Stevens poem co-opted Picasso's The Man with the Blue Guitar to exemplify an art that does "not play things as they are" by attempting to copy nature...

...Not all of thepoets represented, however, feel so comfortable with pictures...

...Writers & Writing POETS AS ART CRITICS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL WALLACE Stevens, who was an art collector as well as a poet, enjoyed quoting the Goncourt brothers' observation that "nothing in the world hears as many silly things said as a picture ina museum...

...Certainly, American and British modernist poets looked to Continental painting for indications of theories congenial to the age (they likewise studied jazz for rhythmic novelty...

...The essays by Pound and Lawrence rise to the shrill taunt of the schoolyard bully—"See it my way, if you don't want a black eye...

...Robert Duncan and his subject, the "pasteup" artist Jess Collins, have lived and worked together for three decades...

...Others in the collection write about artists who are close personal friends...

...These essays show how painters and poets look to each other to divine what form they might take next...

...McClatchy to bring together essays on art by 26 modern writers of verse...

...Yet Howard recalls that Rodin originally titled his heroic statue "Dante," and modeled it to brood above his unfinished Gates of Hell, not to preach to the town square...

...Poets on Painting (California, 362 pp., $25.00) prefaces each article with a black-and-white reproduction of the picture under discussion, and a short introduction by the editor (himself a distinguished critic and poet...

...A corollary to this view might be that a poet tells more about his own art in essays like these than about the art of the painter who is the ostensible subject...

...indeed, "the writer will always envy the painter" for his ability to perceive and recall details...

...Many poets express a wistfulness toward the directness of the visual, as if their own struggles to evoke impressions through language were somehow more strenuous or risky...