ABSTRACT
The work of British poet Lee Harwood (b.1939) displays a particular interest in both readers and narratives and in spectators and images. Narrators of Harwood poems enter the stories or the artworks they are describing, as in ‘The Final Painting’, whose subject expands to ‘envelop the watcher’ (Harwood 1988: 80). Harwood’s poetry is rarely ekphrastic in any conventional sense, but it returns again and again to the relationship of word and image. In ‘The paint box’ (Harwood 1988: 71), ‘The poem was printed out like a neat label / and stuck below the picture’, although the poem seems to suggest that there can never be enough paint to portray reality in all its complexity. In ‘Formal Portrait’ (which seems to be about Mogul miniatures), ‘The number of possible scenes and descriptions / seems nearly as unlimited as the ever changing light’ (Harwood 1988: 88-9). There is a constant movement between the attempts of cultural forms to contain experience and the limitless capacity of experience to exceed those attempts.
