A SPACIO-TEMPORAL INVESTIGATION OF THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT, ECO-POETRY AND PAINTING

Fortress Isaiah Ayinuola (Literature) Department of Languages and General Studies College of Developmental Studies Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria. oviforts@yahoo.com.au isaiah.fortress@covenantuniversity.edu.ng +23408033759546

“Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is painting which is heard but not seen”. – Leonardo da Vinci – Abstract

There has been a general decline in the appreciation of the visual arts in recent times especially

painting. Several poets, visual artists and individual poets like Keats and Osundare of succeeding

epochs have been impacted by visual arts and verbal arts alike, and have themselves sustained

such influences in their poetic output. However, the study that we are aware of has not taken into

account the time-space divide and the aesthetic value inherent in promoting the course of the

natural environment through the collaboration of painting and poetry. The paper examined the

time-space relationship between the visual and the verbal arts; the aesthetic imperative, the place

of nature poetry in practice and in relation to other forms of art like painting. The paper adapted

Ecocriticism and the Impressionistic criticism interfaced with Comparative approach. Our

method is the spacio-temporal investigation of the relationship between verbal and visual arts,

especially poetry and painting. Polystratus, in mid-second century A.D. proposed to his painter-

friend Lycinus, for a “verbovisual” collaboration of poetry and painting, to combine portraits,

one of sound and the other of colour, and to merge them into a literary form. It is this verbo-

visual vision that this paper reconstructed into ‘eco-verbo-visual poetry’: a combination of the

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natural environment, poetry and painting dialectics under what we tentatively called grapho-

poetics. The paper proposed an interdisciplinary practice and collaboration between distinct

species of arts to be merged into one aesthetic whole.

Key Words: Ecocriticism, Impressionism, natural environment, eco-verbo-visual poetry,

aesthetic, painting, grapho-poetics, Keats, Osundare.

1.1. Eco-Poetry, Painting and the Natural Environment

McFarland (1982) O.B. Hardison, Jr. basing his argument on Aristotle’s poetics, contends that

the Greeks have distinguished between the often symbiotic arts of rhythm – dance, music and

speech (literature) presided over by the Muses, on the one hand, and activities like sculpture and

painting whose means of imitation are colour and form respectively subsumed under the label

‘techne’ on the other. Painting and sculpture are ranked slightly above the crafts or arts of

making. This was the lot of the visual arts through much of antiquity and Middle Ages (251).

Seneca, for instance, was reported to have denied painting a place among the liberal arts

perpetuated by the “Scholastics, from whose academic curricula it was banished, music

subordinate to mathematics and literature, attached to rhetoric (McFarland, 252). Literature was

eventually liberated from music, exemplified by the evolution of verbal genres. This resulted in a

realignment and rehabilitation of painting and sculpture in Hellenistic times. The bond that

united literature and the visual arts is increasingly felt as early as the late sixth or early fifth

century B.C. Plutarch in his “On the Fame of Athenians” contends that Simonides of Ceos

referred to painting as “mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture”(252).

In the Middle Ages however, the theological attitude towards painting was divided. While the

eye, considered as the window of the soul was regarded as the most spiritual organ of sense

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perception on one hand, it was also seen as the mirror in which the sensuous and sensual nature

of the world was reflected. Aesthetically, the latter view seems to have prevailed. Isidore of

Serville opines that ‘pictura’ is essentially ‘fictura’ (a feigned representation rather than a

truthful rendering of reality). Christian thinkers like Saint Augustine preferred music and

architecture to painting and sculpture. Nonetheless, the aesthetic emancipation of the visual arts,

coupled with the social emancipation of the painters and sculptors whose exodus from the artisan

guilds culminated in the foundation of academics of what then become known as the fine arts.

This occurs in the Italian Renaissance, where ‘ut picture poesis’ is literally taken to imply the

equality of poetry and painting.

In Leonardo da Vinci’s comparison of the arts, and the hierarchy of the arts, at the height of the

early Renaissance, presents in his Paragone that painting excels over both music and literature.

He contends that “Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is painting which is

heard but not seen” (253). He opines further that they are in a way synonymous since these two

arts can be called poetry or painting because they have the capacity to interchange the senses by

which they penetrate to the intellect: “Whatever is painted must pass by the eye, which is the

nobler sense and whatever is poetry must pass through a less noble sense, the ear, to the

understanding” (253).

The visual arts were firmer in the fusion of the arts in the architectural and theatrical in the form

of linkage of music, poetry and drama, and the consequent bonds between literature and visual

arts. John Dryden contends in his De Arte Graphica(1695): “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting”,

that “Painting and poetry are two sisters, they mutually lend to each other both their Name and

Office.” (254). The intimacy of such relationship was further confirmed by ancient writers like

Cicero, Tertullian and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo who referred to painting and poetry not only as

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siblings but as twins”(McFarland, 254). Lessing, in contrast to this position posits against word

painting and pictorial narrative alike, but demands for a separation of “bed and board”(254). He

went on to set strict limits for the visual and verbal arts: “If it be true that painting, in its

imitation, makes use of entirely different means and signs from those which poetry employs: the

former employing figures and colours in space, the latter articulating sounds in time” (254). It is

clear that Lessing’s emphasizes the differences rather than the similarities between the two arts

and the media to which painting and poetry are tied.

2.1. Eco-criticism and Impressionism Criticism

The impressionistic theory remain relevant in this discourse in regard to the value of art in

poetry, its relevance to the individual talent and taste and its significance as social and aesthetic

imperatives. Ecocriticism is a study of the relationship between the natural environment and

literature, While Geddes & Gross(1999) contends that Impressionism is a 19 th century art

movement in painting which originated in France and centred on a fairly diverse group of artists

like Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morissot, Camille Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. The name of

the movement was coined by critics from a painting by Monet in 1874 exhibition entitled

Impression: Soleil Levant. The advent of photography and scientific theories about colour had

their impact on the painters’ approach to their work. The Impressionists were concerned with

representing day to day existence in an objective and realistic manner, and they rejected the

Romantic idea that a painting should convey strong emotions. They represent in their paintings

effects of light and movement and their usual subjects were landscape and social scenes (116).

Impressionism has had an enormous influence on almost every subsequent major art movements

like Cubism, the synthetic art of Gauguin through Seurat and Neo-Impressionists, and on

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Expressionism through the works of van Gogh. This influence continued in a large proportion of

20th-century art (Geddes & Grosset, 1999:116-117).

The Impressionism criticism, according to Abrahams (1987), attempts to represent in words the

felt qualities of a particular passage or work, and to express the responses which the work

directly evokes from the critic (36). The application of these criticisms in this paper will help us

to explore and investigate in depth the relationships that exist between poetry and painting on

one hand and the natural environment on the other.

Walter Pater later in his Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (36), opines that in

criticism “the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own

impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly”. While Anatole France’s

absolute contention was that work of the artist is “the adventures of a sensitive soul among

masterpieces”(36). The two terms aesthetics and critical theory (or theory of literature) identify

two activities. The first look from philosophy towards art, and the second from art toward

philosophy. The word “aesthetics” was first used to indicate the philosophical investigation of art

by the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. He stressed that “philosophy and knowledge of how

to construct a poem, which are often held to be entirely antithetical, are linked together in the

most amiable union” (McFarland, 34). He further contends that the realm of the artistic is that of

sense impression.

2.2. Beauty and Sublime as Aesthetic Markers in Eco-Poetry and Painting

Wellek and Warren(1982) observes that Croce’s first work on aesthetics was called “Teoria”, but

the second part fell short of the critic and poet’s expectation, because it was not an application of

that theory but rather “Storia”, that is, a history of other aesthetic theories. His chief aim is the

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relating of art to other areas of philosophical preoccupation (34). To take the phrase “Beauty is

truth and truth beauty” in isolation of the entire poem will mean to reduce a work of art into a

philosophical or doctrinal statement devoured of its flesh and seed as Wellek and Warren puts it,

“to disintegrate its structure and impose alien criteria of value”(111).

Emmanuel Kant, in his Critic of Reason (1790) compares the difference between the Beautiful

and the Sublime, noting that beauty is connected with the form of the object, having boundaries,

while the sublime is to be found in a formless object, represented by boundlessness. He considers

the feeling of observer of the sublime as akin to observing turbulent natural environment

phenomenon like the flooding of Katrina or the Tsunami. A scene perceived from an object that

threatens to hurt or destroy an observer. The pleasure perceived of the universe in the knowledge

of the observer’s nothingness and oneness with nature. Edmund Burke, considers ugliness as an

aesthetic quality and compares beauty, the sublime and the awesomeness of the natural

environment by considering the value of the sublime on art. This view of ‘ugliness as an

aesthetic marker was further developed into a new kind of criticism by T.M. Know who in his

Aesthetics Lecture on Fine Arts(1975), considers the sublime as a marker of cultural difference.

His argument is based on the Oriental or African cultures which most western critics describe as

less ‘developed’, Know observes that cultures like the Chinese are autocratic in political

structures and more fearful of divine law. Thus, oriental artists are more inclined towards artistic

expressions; leaning more to the sublime which are expressed in the form of excess of intricate

details characterized by the dazzling and multiple colours and patterns including its embodiment

and formlessness. These were typical examples of the sublime which the West might see as

‘ugly’ but which inspires the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe. That same

feeling of terror, subliminal “darkness” or “ugliness” is expressed by Huxley (1973), on the

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disinterested nature of the African forest region. John Keats, for instance, is a poet that combines

the appreciation of this – beauty, sublime and ugliness - three aspects of nature’s aesthetic

qualities. A quality which Eruvbetine (1985), refers to as “Keatsian aesthetic ideal” (202). Keats

does not only appreciate beauty, he derives poetic pleasures from the boundless magnitude of the

sublime in nature, and he is not timid in life’s inevitable ugliness – the pains and the escapes and

it is from these examples of beauty, sublime and ugliness that Keats creative imagination in a

poem like “Ode to a Grecian Urn” find poetic expressions. Keats himself, refers to immortal

works of beauty as “souls of poets”, that serve as the means by which they “hold lofty converse

with after times”(Eruvbetine, 1985:253).

The beauty in Keats’ works is not in abstract forms but concretized in sensual and pictorial forms

and this helps readers to appreciate his nature-poems. The rhythm that makes up our ecosystem

and sustains life in the natural environment is an archetype of “eternal music” which Keats refers

to. The rhythm that is sustained by keeping the balance through the mutual exchange of giving

and taking in, of carbon dioxide and oxygen by plants and animals respectively. The beauty of

the natural environment is destroyed by rocking the rhythm of the ecosystem through discordant

sound, air, water and soil pollutions. Relatively, this position on beauty of our natural

environment is not the concern of romantic poets of Keats time but this is inevitably the concept,

qualities and tool required in our study of the natural environment.

While Keats is “a poet of sense impressions, Osundare is a poet of word impression. According

to Osundare “The Yoruba has a deep abiding respect for and interest in the word (ohun/oro). I

like words and, their music: the way that music informs their meanings, the way words make

things happen or not happen; the bridges they build and the gulfs they impose; their love-and

hate relationship with silence” (Shook, Web: September, 2007).

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Oscar Wilde in his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey (1977) sees the artist as “the creator of

beautiful things” (5). He opines that distinct from the expressionist, art is the focus and not the

artist. The “aim of art is to reveal art and conceal the artist”(5). Wilde’s position regarding

aesthetic: beauty, the sublime and the ugly in any work of art is that “Those who find ugly

meanings in beautiful things are corrupt and those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful

things are the cultivated”(5). He concurs with John Keats’ view that “beauty is truth and truth

beauty” (Gittings, 1978:128).

3.1. Nature-Poetry in English and African Literary Traditions

Huxley (1973) criticizing Wordsworth’s conception of the romantic tradition opines that

Wordsworth’s advocacy that we worship, love and revere nature, the rivers, the woods, the

flowers, animals, birds, etc. as great teachers of knowledge and morality is not tenable. Huxley

further contends that Wordsworth’s pantheistic philosophy is only possible in the Lake District.

He never travelled beyond the boundaries of Europe but had confined his knowledge of nature to

Europe that is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, and a neat

metaphysical system which man has recreated in his own image (2084), and not in the tropics.

According to Huxley, there is a disquieting strangeness in nature in the tropics: swimming

alligators, forests fever, dangerous or impassable mountains and to travel is to hack one’s way

laboriously through tangled prickly venomous dangerous darkness.

Though Huxley is convinced that romanticism will not thrive in wild dangerous tropics, he

agreed with George Meredith in his poem ‘Woods of Westermaid’ that the terror and fear

associated with the forest and therefore the natural environment are more apparent than real: “If

we but trust nature, we shall find our fears transformed into serenity, joy and rapture” (Fowler

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1994:2085). The perception of foreign critics about African forest environment is

understandable. In order to get a balanced view however, the works of nature poets like Gabriel

Okara, Nkiriko Ibiware, Tanure Ojaide and Niyi Osundare on the African natural environment

and Nigerian rain forest in particular is necessary. Osundare, for example was born and educated

in Nigeria. As a poet, he wrote extensively about the natural environment of this region in

question, in his collection of poems The Eye of The Earth (1986).

These poets, consciously or unconsciously demonstrate Wordsworth’s dictum of learning from

the ants: “let nature be your teacher” Woodring (41). They contemplate nature and listen to it as

a teacher. They write in the romantic tradition and their poetic outputs are proofs that this dictum

is tenable and applicable in the conquered and domesticated temperate lands as well as in the

wild tropics. In “The Call of the River Nun” for example, Gabriel Okara expresses the nostalgic

pleasure of tropical environment which gives him excitement of sweet memories. Osundare’s

“Ode to a Falling Tree” in Songs of the Season (1990) is a praise poem on a tree. The tree

remained the dwelling place ‘for a harvest of birds chirping crisp serenades for a parting day’.

The beauty which this element in nature confers on the environment is contrasted with the

bareness that comes to it when: “One noon a thoughtless matchet hurried out of its/ Itching

sheath a few maddening scoops and the/ Towering glory crashed to the muddy earth (143). There

is in this poem a vivid picture of an aspect of the beauty of nature’s beauty reduced to waste.

Osundare laments the mindless destruction of nature as man strives after modernization to the

detriment of the natural environment. In the place of the lovely songs of the birds is silence.

Though man thoughtlessly destroys good and useful things of his environment, the global trend

today is the crusading for the preservation of the natural environmental and the priceless works

of art.

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3.2. Art, Poetic Vision and Eco-Poetry

Niyi Osundare, commenting on his views on art, contends that:

“My artistic philosophy of art is essentially holistic: Form enhances content, while content in turn enriches form; aesthetic elegance has to be balanced with social relevance. A Yoruba artist, constantly seek the meeting point of the beautiful and the useful. Humanity comes first, hand in hand with a clear visionary thrust: for the poem or story that has no “eye” can only stumble into sterility and darkness” (Na’allah, xxv).

Regarding art and Osundare’s poetic vision, he observes that the traditional responsibility to

speak for the people, the contemporary Nigeria poets is aware of the public duty of an artist. An

eco-poet, Niyi Osundare contends that art has a purpose. He believes in the social status of art

that it must be used to advance the cause of humanity.

3.3. Nature Poets and Arts: Interfacing Poetry and Painting

Fowler (1994) contends that while Keats is influenced by Greek classical and neo-classical art,

mythology and literature which reflect in his poems like “Lamia”, “Hyperion” and “Endymion”,

in 1813 when Keats first began to read lyric poetry, it is Edmund Spenser’s works that draw him

closer to poetry, and Percy Shelley, his friend, that inspires him. He challenges Keats to an epic

poetry competition over the summer. The poem “Endymion” is the result of that competition.

Nature has many meanings but the ones that classicists invoke are preconceived, abstract,

philosophical and static. Others are psychological nature; scientific and concrete nature of

geographical exploration. Until the seventeenth century at least, the unexploited natural

environment is generally repulsive, the forests and wildernesses are horrible and dreaded, but by

very gradual change, wider settlement and growth of town populations, affection for travel into

wild regions and consequent picturesque paintings become fashionable. Horace Walpole, for

instance, in 1739, writes of how built environment started to find inroad into the natural

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environment: “road winding round a prodigious mountain and a torrent breaking through cliffs,

and tumbling through fragments of rocks!” (204). This sublime view had an impression on

Richard West who said: “Your description of the Alps made me shudder...”(204).

Keats who never left England until 1820,the very year before he died, produced works which

often reminds one of Titan, Claude, Poussin, and John Martins and the like, whose works were

largely of Greek origin. The paintings and sculptures of ancient Greece from where his

inspiration comes from must be in their original form or in form of reproduction. He had the

opportunity to use both in his poetry. There are two basic worlds of classical antiquity as

recreated by the Neo-classical painters and the world of the Middle Ages as recreated by the

Neo-classical painters and the world of the middle ages as recreated by the antiquaries and

romance writers and artists of the 18th century.

We have writers and artists like Charles James Fox, Benjamin West, Samuel Rogers, Fanny

Burney and Hazlitt Williams. Keats regards their works of art as: “The choicest remains of the

works of arts. There were the golden hues of Titan, the Raphael’s and the gorgeous gloom of

Rembrandt and the airy elegance of Vandyke and Claude’s classic scenes…” Finch (320). From

these mental and visual painting, Keats draws most of his poetic inspirations. For instance poems

like “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a product resulting from engravings of Henry Moses, the Elgin

Marble, the Townley Vase and Claude’s paintings like View of Delphi with a procession.

In reference to his preference for imagination over fancy in poetic creativity, Keats in a letter to

his brother George in September 1819, confides: “You speak of Lord Byron and me - There is

this great difference between us. He describes what he sees - I describe what I imagine - Mine is

the hardest task.” Keats (Gitting, 1978). In the same vain: on natural environment and art, Keats

though, awed by the magnitude of the mountains of the country side, he nevertheless, disagrees

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with Hazlitt, a contemporary poet and painter who infers that “such scenes make man appear

little”. Keats’ reply is: “I cannot think with William Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear

little. I never forget my status so completely – I live in the eye and my imagination, surpassed, is

at rest” (53-54). The phrase: “I live in the eye” is Keats’ response to his stand on imagination

and the beautiful: be it in poetry, painting or the sublimity of the natural environment. According

to Keats, ‘I create what my imagination perceives as beautiful’ – I live in the eye of what my

imagination tells me. Poetic imagination and creativity are subject to the mind’s eyes and the

physical eyes are only a vehicle of the mind’s eyes. His position is quite distinct from that of his

contemporary and critic, George Byron who describes what his physical eyes see. Keats

describes what he imagines through the vehicle of his physical eyes. Thus, Keats is synonymous

to his imagination and this is why he believes that poets are “most unpoetical of all things, they

occupy other things” (87). Keats’ imagination is not subject to his physical eyes so by

implication, Keats can occupy bodies: flow like a river and endure storms like the mountains.

From the above perspectives, it is imperative that the power of poetic imagination coupled with

visual sense impressions is fundamental in painting and poetic creativity.

3.4. Verbo-visual Poetry: a Poetry and Painting Collaboration

According to Weisstein (1982) in his “Literature and the Visual Arts”, Polystratus, in mid-

second century A.D. proposed to his painter friend Lycinus, for a ‘verbovisual’ (252)

collaboration of poetry and painting:

to combine our portraits, yours of the body and mine of the soul, and throw them into a literary form, for the enjoyment of our generation and of all posterity which will be more enduring than those of the painters” Barricelli & Gibaldi (253).

It is this artistic vision and most importantly, A.W. Schlegel’s desire to “bring the arts closer to

each other, and to look for transitions from one art form to the other” (256) that bathes the

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collaboration of painting and eco-poetry, which we tentatively call grapho-poetics in this paper.

In constructing a montage of graphic artistry or painting with poetry, placing side by side poetry

and painting in order to stimulate the reader’s imagination, poetic and visual senses, we came up

with ‘verbo-visual poems’ like “The Cock Crows” and “Oasis”. This juxtaposition of eco-poetry

and painting in its finished form shares themes, motifs and meanings expressed in poetic and

visual modes.

Conclusion

This paper examines the nature and workings of two distinct work of art, poetry and painting,

genres of verbal arts and visual arts respectively and how they can be constructed to provide an

aesthetic whole. By exploring this genealogical reading and spacio-temporal investigation of arts

– poetry and painting in particular, literary visions and aesthetic imperatives, we are able to

articulate a practice based on the alignment of these two distinct disciplines in the verbal arts and

visual arts. From our findings, we deduced that poetry and painting, when aesthetically

constructed, can mutually complement one another. They can both be expressed in verbo-visual

form without one form losing its unique attribute to the other. The plates below are the results of

this eco-verbo-visual collaboration, a combination of the natural environment, poetry and

painting as represented in what I tentatively called the Grapho-poetics discourse:

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The Cock Crows Encompassed by grains of sand, the Oasis stood like the eye of the earth, gazing The sun steps out Into the horizon. In flowing rays.

Fig. 1&2: Mute Poetry and Speaking Pictures in Haiku Form

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