The Poetics of Sight

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Illustrations

Plates

Figures

The author wishes to express his thanks to the following sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it:

Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 9; Cambridge University Library: 1–4, 6, 26–9; Photo © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: II, 21; used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington: 5; Manchester Art Gallery: 36; the Whitworth, University of Manchester: 10; Photo © The National Gallery, London 2015: VIII, 35; Museo del Prado, Madrid: I; Photo © Tate, London 2015: IV, V, IX, 12, 24–5; Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London: VI; Library of Congress, Washington, DC: 9; Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection: 8, 19–20, 22–3; Yale University Art Gallery: front cover.

Acknowledgements

My first thanks must be to Barrie Bullen, for inviting me to articulate at book length an argument I had been developing, while working on different authors and artists, touching not merely the linguistic but the distinctly poetic processes that may operate as we shape, both verbally and through images, the sights we observe and the sights we invent. I do believe there is an issue for aesthetics here which has been relatively neglected in the broad advance of visual culture studies. I am grateful for the patience and goodwill of the distinguished Blake scholar Professor Joe Viscomi, who kindly read and commented on my own heterodox discussion of Blake. Dr Ilona Roth has generously advised me on the implications for visual perception of advances in cognitive psychology. Particular points in the argument have been made over the years in lectures in Cambridge and elsewhere on literature, visual art and visual culture, and I cannot say when they were first made. My first attempt on the art of William Blake was in an article, ‘Blake’s Art’, in The Cambridge Quarterly, VII/2, in 1977, and on Shakespeare pictures in an article, ‘Shakespeare and the Ends of Time’, in The Cambridge Review, CXVI/2327, in 1996. Especially I am grateful – otherwise there would be no book – for innumerable occasions of productive exchange, on literary and visual questions, with colleagues, students, friends and with my wife Julietta Harvey.

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Introduction: Sight, the Mind’s Eye and Art

Among my early memories, I enter an upstairs room and see an old, white-haired man lying in bed with the sheet up to his mouth, very still. I scarcely recognize him. My father sits in a chair in the far corner of the room, his chin in his hand, but he looks up and sees me. In another early memory, I come to the door of my parents’ bedroom, and I see them, kneeling side by side with their elbows on the bed, and their hands clasped in prayer. My father, who is nearer to me, looks unhappy: I can see they are praying, and in trouble. In another memory I am falling downstairs, close to the bottom, and looking up I see my father leaning over the banister watching me fall. And in another, I am urgently bundled under a table, I think in our living room.