As Painting Poetry Shall [Not] Be: An Intellectual History of Word and Image Rivalry in British Culture

Abstract

Word and image dialectics will be examined to develop a synthetic, diachronic view that interprets the hierarchy of the arts as the result of the interplay between individual creative talent and cultural paradigms in specific historical periods. The rivalry between painting and poetry will be reassessed to elucidate how and why the changing emphasis on subservience, independence, or interdependence has generated theories of verbocentrism, iconocentrism, and interart osmosis in Great Britain from the seventeenth century to the contemporary age.