Differential Imagery Experience andUt Pictura Poesisin the 18th-century

Abstract

That the ability to visualise, to see with 'the mind's eye', varies between individuals has been known since Francis Galton reported on the results of his 'Breakfast Table' questionnaire in 1880. Research in the ensuing years has supported what Galton's surveys suggested: that the vividness of the population's mental imagery lies across a spectrum, with small percentages at the extremes being bereft of imagery or visualising with near percept-like quality. This paper explores what impact this factor of individual psychological difference had on the literary-theoretical debate over ut pictura poesiswhether poetry can or should emulate paintingas it culminated in the 18th-century. After making the case for personal experience of imagery being an influencing factor on the position that critics in the period took on ut pictura poesis, the paper concludes by engaging with the methodological and conceptual difficultiesfor the philosophy of science as much as for literary theory and history that the line of argument produces.keywords mental imagery, differential psychology, 18th-century British poetics, history of art, history of science, interdisciplinarity Ut Pictura PoesisTaken from his Epistle to the Pisos, Horace's formulation 'ut pictura poesis' -'a poem is like a painting' (Dorsch and Murray 2000, 108)became a central point of contention in theories of visual and verbal art, and of their relation, from antiquity onwards. Originally a benign observation about how the two modes are best encountered, Horace's statement came to stand for the thesis that literature, just as much as the visual or plastic arts, deals in sensory experience, and vision in particular. The parallel goes at least back to Simonides's 'Painting is mute poetry and poetry is a speaking picture' (Markiewicz and Gabara 1987, 535) in the early 5th-century BC, and would go on to be re-iterated by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; Longinus's 1st-century treatise On the Sublime emphasises the poetic power of