Comparative Literature

1. Literature and Other Arts
Dr.B.Kanagalakshmi,
Assistant Professor of English,
V.V.Vanniaperumal College for Women,
Virudhunagar.

2.  Literature and other fine arts like music, painting, sculpture
and architecture have influenced one another.
 Poetry has drawn inspiration from paintings or sculpture or
music. Like natural objects and persons, other works of art
may also become the themes of poetry.
 Spenser drew some of his descriptions from the tapestries
and pageants.
 Keats derived details of Ode on a Grecian Urn from a
specific picture of Claude Lorrain.
Literature and Paintings

3.  Poets have had their theories about painting and their
preferences among painters.
 Robert Browning wrote Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea
Del Sarto on painters of his choice and their theories
about paintings.
 The Pre-Raphaelite poets led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti had
their own ideas about painting and poetry. They wanted to
bring in the quality of painting in poetry.
 William Blake, the great pioneer of Romantic poetry, is
supposed to have written his poems as commentaries on
his pictures.

4.  Hopkins also wrote much of his early poetry below his paintings.
Many writers were artists themselves.
 W.M.Thackeray made sketches for Pickwick Papers by Charles
Dickens.
 Great literary scholars like Ruskin were enthusiastic supporters
of painting and architecture.
 Similarly, literature can become the theme of painting or music.
Forms like the lyric and drama have collaborated with music.
 Kafka’s novels and Picasso’s paintings are illustrative of the same
theme – the disintegration of modern man in the grips of
scientific automism.

5.  Browning’s Abt Vogler builds a musical palace. The verse is
supposed to be musical.
 ‘Musicality’ in verse seems to be something entirely different from
‘melody’ in music. It means an arrangement of phonetic patterns to
produce alliteration, assonance or consonance or rhyme schemes.
They create rhythmical effects.
 Poems have been written with the intention that music should be
added. But it is difficult to prove that the composition of music and
words was a simultaneous process, though some lyrics are
composed to fit ready melodies.
 Wellek and Warren summarise that collaboration between poetry
and music exists: but the highest poetry does not tend towards
music, and the greatest music stands in no need of words.
Literature and Music

6.  Sometimes we notice that one form of art finds expression in
other forms.
 The term ‘sculpturesque’ is applied to poetry that is supposed to
contain elements of sculpture.
 This would merely mean that poetry conveys an impression
somehow similar to the effects of Greek sculpture,i.e. coolness
induced by the white marble, stillness, repose, sharp outline and
clarity.
 Collins’s Ode to Evening is called a ‘sculptured poem’ in the sense
that it has slow, solemn metre and direction which is strange
enough to compel attention to individual words and hence a
slow pace in reading. It does not have any relationship with
sculpture.
One art in other form

7.  Sometimes, one form of art combines many other forms of
art. For example, a masque or an opera combines drama,
dance, song, music, etc.
 Another good example in the classical dance form
‘Bharatanatyam’ which integrates not only dance and
music but the techniques of drama, painting and sculpture.
The dancer dances to the tune of music, employs gestures,
postures, facial expressions, etc.
 Sometimes, expressionistic techniques are employed by
dramatists like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’ Neil.
One art combining other art forms

8.  Sometimes literature attempts to achieve the effects
of painting. Poetry may turn out to be word-picture.
The Eve of St.Agnes by Keats and The Blessed Damozel
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti are very good examples.
 However, one has to bear in mind that these word-
pictures or musical lyrics are no substitutes for
painting or music, because the medium or the mode
is entirely different.