Poetry and painting: Wallace Stevens and Pierre Tal-Coat

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Abstract
‘Thinking about poetry is the same thing,’ Wallace Stevens wrote to Barbara Church on 22 June 1948, ‘as thinking about painting.’1 Yet in the same letter Stevens went on to make two qualifications which would seem to call into question his own analogy. The first would seem to privilege painters over poets: ‘These men [Pissarro and Bonnard] attach one to real things: closely, actually, without the interventions or excitements of metaphor. One wonders sometimes whether this is not exactly what the whole effort of modern art has been about: the attachment to real things. When people were painting cubist pictures, were they not attempting to get at not the invisible but the visible? They assumed that back of the peculiar reality that we see, there lay a more prismatic one of many facets. Apparently deviating from reality, they were trying to fix it: and so on, through their successors.’ But in the following paragraph Stevens offers a second qualification, which would seem to privilege poets over painters: ‘While one thinks about poetry as one thinks about painting, the momentum toward abstraction exerts a greater force on the poet than on the painter. I imagine that the tendency of all thinking is toward the abstract and perhaps I am merely saying that the abstractions of the poet are abstracter than the abstractions of the painter.’

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  • Preface
    Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) ,1802