We probably shouldn't be surprised if visual artists think with greater sophistication than musicians and poets about the resources of the material world. After all, such resources are their artistic alphabet. The printmaker doesn't just enjoy the tones created by cross-hatched lines, he understands the effects of acid. The maker of bronzes knows how that metal behaves during the casting process.

The same resources are also their vocabulary: a colour study is about the colours it's made from. In On Modern Art, Paul Klee distinguishes between colour, weight and tone:

Enmeshed in this spatial materiality, visual art isn't precisely analogous with, so much as simply offering a series of metaphors for, elements within music and poetry. Even the term chromaticism, having crossed over the ‘bridge’ of metaphor to speak for music, seems to forget its origins in the visual.

But I'm not arguing for such an analogy between art and music – or even for one between music and poetry. As my subtitle points out, this book isn't a comparative study, but instead thinks about what poetry does as an extension of what music does. For such an approach to make sense, we need to see those aspects of poetry that it shares with music working in the same way as they do there. In the last chapter we looked at chromaticism as one example of how the non-denotative ‘give’ of elements in poetic language pull against conventional structures in the same way that musical elements pull against each other. Other elements that modify the feel of a poem or of a piece of music include semiotic play, affect, palimpsest, the degrees of integration of different kinds of material, and explicit complicity with the reader or listener. All of these share a lateral quality: that is, they modify sensation as it goes along.