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I have sometimes played with the idea that a ruthlessly literal translation, helped out by bold punctuation, might be the best. For instance, premising that the words poesis, poetes mean originally 'making' and 'maker', one might translate the first paragraph of the Poetics thus: MAKING: kinds of making: function of each, and how the Myths ought to be put together if the Making is to go right.
But having already touched upon the chief points of this tradition, and exceeded the measure of my paper, I shall not give any further account of it. First Paper. Ut pictura poesis erit HOR., Ars Poet. 361. Poems like pictures are. Nothing is so much admired, and so little understood, as wit. No author that I know of has written professedly upon it.
If, as I believe, emotional thought rather than imagery is the essence of poetry, then the modern school of imagists and their French forbears among the "Parnassiens" are mistaken. Their effort comes in the end to a revival of the old thesis ut pictura poesis, the attempt to make poetry a vision of nature rather than an expression of the inner life.
To take every lineament and feature is not to make an excellent piece, but to take so much only as will make a beautiful resemblance of the whole; and, with an ingenious flattery of Nature, to heighten the beauties of some parts, and hide the deformities of the rest. For so, says HORACE Ut pictura Poesis erit Haec amat obscurum; vult haec sub luce videri, Judicis argutum quae non formidat acumen.
If the young poet finds that his work is not of high excellence, he would do better not to publish it. A poem is like a picture, Horace says, in that some poems appear to better advantage close up, and others at a distance. It is noteworthy that in his "ut pictura poesis" Horace is not pressing the analogy between the arts as did subsequent critics who quoted his phrase incompletely.
The change of person pleasantly puts 'Tory' for 'Whig, and avoids party heat by implying a suggestion that excesses are not all on one side. Sacheverell had been a College friend of Addison's. No. 58. Monday, May 7, 1711. Addison. Ut pictura poesis erit ... Hor. Nothing is so much admired, and so little understood, as Wit.
So charming Thomson wrote from his lodgings at a milliner's in Bond-street, whence he seldom rose early enough to see the sun do more than glisten on the opposing windows of the street: but genius, like truth, cannot be kept down. So he wrote, and so they painted! Ut pictura poesis.
This he does in what he says was a common phrase that "poetry is vocal painting, and painting, silent poetry." The false analogy, "ut pictura poesis," establishing, as it does, a sanction in criticism for the static in drama, flourished until Lessing exposed it in his Laocoon.
This is certainly a fact not generally known to those who use Parasols too recklessly. "Poesis Rediviva," by John Collop, M.D. , mentions Umbrellas. Michael Drayton, writing about 1620, speaks of a pair of doves, which are to watch over the person addressed in his verses:
But although SICUT PICTURA POESIS is an ancient and undisputed axiom although poetry and painting both address themselves to the same object of exciting the human imagination, by presenting to it pleasing or sublime images of ideal scenes yet the one conveying itself through the ears to the understanding, and the other applying itself only to the eyes, the subjects which are best suited to the bard or tale-teller are often totally unfit for painting, where the artist must present in a single glance all that his art has power to tell us.
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