The prestigious emergence of music and art are parallel. The tradition of the ‘sister arts’, shows the closest sister to poetry is painting.
Simonides of Ceos claimed that painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.
Horace said, ut picture poesis, ‘as is a picture, so is poetry’.
Perhaps the intimate connection between poetry and music was too obvious to the ancients to need stating, but by the 18th century, modern neoclassicists had repeated these sayings about painting so often that the kinship with music seemed forgotten. The Romantics revived it, especially in Germany, and dislodged painting from its privileged rank. Kleist regarded the art of music ‘as the algebraic formula of all the others’. Friedrich Schlegel, in his novel Lucinde, describes ‘How happy Julius was when he talked with her about music and heard from her mouth his own inmost thoughts about the sacred enchantment of this romantic art!’ E.T.A. Hoffman agreed that music is the most romantic art, and perhaps the only romantic one. ‘No color is as Romantic as a tone’, wrote Jean Paul. Heine declared music to be ‘art’s final word’.
This exaltation of music is especially strong in Germany, home of musicians – indeed many German poets were themselves good musicians – but it can be found in France and even in unmusical Britain. Coleridge thought a man of mere talent could incorporate visual imagery in his poetry, ‘But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination.’ Wordsworth wrote a poem called “The Power of Music”. If Keats was fascinated by the sight of a Grecian urn, he was even more rapt by the song of a nightingale. Music pervades Shelley’s poetic world as the great medium of love and communion, not only between people but, in Prometheus Unbound, between planets – the music of the spheres.
In literature, the revival of lyric forms attests indirectly to the growing prestige of music. More intriguing is the question whether painting, no longer the favorite sister of poetry, became musical.
Romanticism was a revolution, and tended for a while towards a new system, unstable and incomplete though it was, with many widespread recurrences in form and style as well as theme. It was the last revolution, for no movement in any of the arts since then has been as long, deep, influential and coherent.