wevend -i

Poetry has always inspired artists. 

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the most enduring. And according to Art Everywhere, of which I will say little here but have written about elsewhere, the nation’s favourite painting is inspired by a more recent poem: JW Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott shows the ill-fated [noodlottige] heroine of Tennyson’s famous verse moving inexorably [onverbiddelijk] towards her watery death “like some bold seer in a trance”. The second favourite is, incidentally, another narrative illustration of an ill-fated heroine on the point of meeting her watery fate – Millais’s Ophelia.

The Victorian era was the last big hurrah of literature-inspired visual works of art, and it was decidedly gothic in flavour. But the 20th century saw the death of narrative painting, and illustrations from myth and literature dropped out of fashion.

Painters were still influenced by literature, of course, but the influence, with a few notable exceptions, played out in more abstract, nebulous ways. Instead, we find a decisive switch – it’s writers who turn increasingly to the works of painters and sculptors. Poets looked to the historical canon – I haven’t included it here, but surely Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb is the greatest postwar poem to be inspired by a single work of art. But more often Modernist poets, particularly in America, looked to Modernist artists for inspiration.

The conservative Larkin was no fan of Modernism, seeing ugliness and destruction in its methods. Yet for many other writers, Modernism in the visual arts appeared regenerative in its violence to form. Like visual artists of the 20th century, writers were no longer portraying a window on to the world as it had appeared since the Renaissance, but obviously filtered and changed by the imagination in startling ways. To quote Wallace Stevens (no.4), responding to Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Below, responding to old and modern paintings... 

I’ve chosen nine 20th-century poems... 

and one 21st-century one. 

The poems are illustrated by the paintings... 

that directly inspired their thoughts.

~bron~