ABSTRACT
With the strongly visual orientation of baroque poetry, it is not uncommon to find an imaginative landscape organized around a scheme of background and foreground, mass and detail, following the simplest organization of the visual field into figure and ground. It is the figure area in painting which is perceived as advancing from the recessive ground, and which generally possesses greater density and texture. The poem unfolds a counterpoint of fantasy and reality which is superimposed upon a primary division into background and foreground, but as is often the case in baroque art, the relationship between figure and ground is complex and even deceptive. The contrasts and dualities in the Polifemo are many and serve to produce an impression of extreme tension, of a dynamism contained and intricately orchestrated.
