Poetry and painting

https://hazlitt.net/feature/why-we-should-treat-poetry-painting

Extract:

“Perhaps because poetry is art made of words rather than pictures, readers expect it to communicate more directly. And certainly, some poems are fairly straightforward, in the same way that some paintings are clearly of horses, so that even the title “Horses” is unnecessary. But some poems would certainly gain aesthetically if they were freed from the burden of explanation. Poets themselves, I find, can be resistant to the idea of including notes or epigraphs, feeling that a poem should be self-contained and include all the necessary information. There are plenty of poets who neither provide notes nor contort their poems into self-explanatory shapes—these are some of my favourites, but I have to read them with one eye on the poem and one eye on Google. Who’s Count Westwest? What’s nanofluff? Who’s Joe Sakic? Curatorial text that takes care of some of these immediate questions, and that also provides some interpretative remarks about the poem and how it fits into the poetic tradition, might help new readers appreciate what they’re looking at.”