The parallel between poetry and painting harks back to Antiquity. It seemed obvious because both arts appeal to the intellect as well as the eye. In his Ars poetica (approx. 20 b.C.), Horace gave a terse formulation to the parallel: ut pictura poesis. Later critics dislodged what was in Horace just an obiter dictum, from its context, which in Horace referred to the appropriate distance of a beholder/reader from a picture/text. In English literature, the Neo-Classical cult of the Ancients straddling the year 1700 produced a spate of translations of Horace''s Ars poetica, and the translators'' accompanying comments suggest a wide range of idiosyncratic applications of the Latin poet''s maxim. One form of poetical expression of the parallel particularly favoured by English Neo-Classical poets was landscape description. However, landscapes'' had to fight opposition on two fronts, viz. the rigid Neo-Classical canon, and the prevalent mould of the description of outdoor scenery as seen in eg
ARK Bokhandel
