As is evident from my epigraphs, it would not be easy to use T. S. Eliot's various remarks on painters as an incisive measure of how the visual functions in his poetry. Nor will it help much if we want to supplement what David Trotter calls ‘parallel histories’ between literature and various aspects of visual art. We get a better picture of his relation to the visual arts if we concentrate on the pains and difficulties that Eliot's work displays when it renders visual experience. Such comparisons allow us to trace analogies between his own discomfort before images that seem to be vying for his attention and modernist visual artists' own alienation from claims that description or representation provided the most stable means of characterising knowledge and so clarifying values. Eliot's own actual relation to the visual arts seems, then, an outgrowth of his wariness before all visual experience, because that experience seemed so insistently bound to objective surfaces that it could not display the density of relations that, for Eliot, constituted a livable reality.

It is clear from Eliot's letters that what most interested him in the visual arts were images of St Sebastian.