theoryofliteratu00inwell

CHAPTER XI
Literature and the Other Arts
The relationships of literature with the fine arts and music
are highly various and complex. Sometimes poetry has drawn
inspiration from paintings or sculpture or music. Like natural
objects and persons, other works of art may become the themes
of poetry. That poets have described pieces of sculpture, painting,
or even music presents no particular theoretical problem. Spenser,
it has been suggested, drew some of his descriptions from
tapestries and pageants 5 the paintings of Claude Lorrain and
Salvatore Rosa influenced eighteenth-century landscape poetry j
Keats derived details of his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" from a spe-
cific picture of Claude Lorrain. 1 Stephen A. Larrabee has con-
sidered all the allusions and treatments of Greek sculpture to be
found in English poetry. 2 Albert Thibaudet has shown that
Mallarme's "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" was inspired by a paint-
ing of Boucher in the London National Gallery. 3 Poets, espe-
cially nineteenth-century poets like Hugo, Gautier, the Parnas-
siens, and Tieck, have written poems on definite pictures. Poets,
of course, have had their theories about painting and their pref-
erences among painters, which can be studied and more or less
related to their theories about literature and their literary tastes.
Here is a wide area for investigation, only partially traversed in
recent decades. 4
In its turn, obviously, literature can become the theme of
painting or of music, especially vocal and program music, just
as literature, especially the lyric and the drama, has intimately
collaborated with music. In an increasing number, there are
studies of medieval carols or Elizabethan lyrical poetry which
stress the close association of the musical setting. 5 In art history
there has appeared a whole group of scholars (Erwin Panofsky,
Fritz Saxl, and others) who study the conceptual and symbolic
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