The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics includes an article by Pei, "Perceiving Intermedial Romanticism: ‘The Eye sees more than the heart knows’ and ‘the despotism of the eye’":
Unlike the poets in the twenty-first centuries, where the phenomenon of ‘intermediality’ be
tween literature and visual arts is commonly witnessed with the development of modern art
movements, Romantic poets in the late eighteenth century seem to align the music more than the
painting. Against the long-standing tradition of ut pictura poesis, M. H. Abrams writes in The Mirror
and the Lamp: ‘In place of painting, music becomes the art frequently pointed to as having a profound
affinity with poetry. For if a picture seems the nearest thing to a mirror-image of the external world,
music, of all the arts, is the most remote’ (Abrams, 50). This notion of mirror-image has the similar
attributes to the Platonic conception of the painting in The Republic, where Plato maintained the
painting is the ‘twice removal’ from ‘the Truth’ or ‘the Form’ (Republic,10.597b-598d). However,
this paper argues that the visual arts still play the essential role in shaping Romantic visionary mind
beyond the mode of Platonic mimesis.
This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of intermediality in British Romantic poetry, with a particular interest in the interplay between visual arts and poetic visions in William Blake and William Wordsworth. In the first section, William Blake’s unique way of illuminated printing will be introduced, with the specific attention to the making-process and techniques. Then his poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) will be discussed through an intermedial lens exploring the interaction between his paintings and poetry, based on his idea in the motto: ‘The Eye sees more than the Heart knows’. In the second section, the paradoxical representations of visuality in William Wordsworth’s poetry will be emphasized in the dialogue between the idea of ‘the picturesque’ and his concepts of the ‘despotism of the eye’. Particularly, Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour (1798), together with its conversation with William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty will be focused here. Therefore, different understandings of the relationship between the ‘eye’ and the ‘mind’ or between visuality and vision in Blake’s and Wordsworth’s visionary poetry will be revealed through the comparison between Blake’s ‘The Eye sees more than the heart knows’ and Wordsworth’s ‘the despotism of the eye’.
This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of intermediality in British Romantic poetry, with a particular interest in the interplay between visual arts and poetic visions in William Blake and William Wordsworth. In the first section, William Blake’s unique way of illuminated printing will be introduced, with the specific attention to the making-process and techniques. Then his poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) will be discussed through an intermedial lens exploring the interaction between his paintings and poetry, based on his idea in the motto: ‘The Eye sees more than the Heart knows’. In the second section, the paradoxical representations of visuality in William Wordsworth’s poetry will be emphasized in the dialogue between the idea of ‘the picturesque’ and his concepts of the ‘despotism of the eye’. Particularly, Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour (1798), together with its conversation with William Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty will be focused here. Therefore, different understandings of the relationship between the ‘eye’ and the ‘mind’ or between visuality and vision in Blake’s and Wordsworth’s visionary poetry will be revealed through the comparison between Blake’s ‘The Eye sees more than the heart knows’ and Wordsworth’s ‘the despotism of the eye’.
Serena Qihui Pei is a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at University College London.
"Perceiving Intermedial Romanticism: ‘The Eye sees more than the heart knows’ and ‘the despotism of the eye’" is available from the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. (Open access.)