ABSTRACT
John Wain’s lengthy poem ‘The Shipwreck’ is about J. M. W. Turner’s painting of that name from 1805. John Wain’s reading of the picture moves from the technical to the philosophical; from how Turner’s colours create sound to a consideration of how art can catch a momentary beauty at the point of death. David Dabydeen can accept neither Turner’s creative enjoyment in depicting the subject as a wholly innocent act nor, despite the contemporary concerns of the abolitionists, Turner’s exhibition of the painting as a public protest when it came so late, years after Britain’s slave trade had been abolished. ‘There is no sacred Turner’, he asserts; and, certainly one dimension of his poem is its deconstruction of the whole concept of Turner’s poetic painting. The poetic in Turner is thus identified directly with art’s ability at ‘showing’–the verb that both painter and poet use in place of ‘understood’.
