While comparative literature is a well-recognized field of study, the notion of comparative arts remains unfamiliar to many. In this fascinating book, Daniel Albright addresses the fundamental question of comparative arts: Are there many different arts, or is there one art which takes different forms? He considers various artistic media, especially literature, music, and painting, to discover which aspects of each medium are unique and which can be “translated” from one to another. Can a poem turn into a symphony, or a symphony into a painting?   Albright explores how different media interact, as in a drama, when speech, stage decor, and music are co-present, or in a musical composition that employs the collage method of the visual arts. Tracing arguments and questions about the relations among the arts from Aristotle’s  Poetics to the present day, he illuminates the understudied discipline of comparative arts and urges new attention to its riches. “This marvelous book―an instant classic―excites, inspires, provokes, and (when provocation does not suit) gently coaxes the reader into accepting its claims. Albright has obviously mulled over the relationships among the literary, visual, and musical arts for many years, yet the result of his meditation is surprisingly fresh.”―Simon Morrison, Princeton University -- Simon Morrison “With astonishing range, quicksilver riffs, and aphorisms to die for, Daniel Albright creates nothing less than a pagan poetics for the modern age. Panaesthetics is Pan’s aesthetic, an endlessly musical sensibility sublimely at home in a world where Art is everything and everything is Art.”― Scott Burnham, author of Mozart's Grace -- Scott Burnham “In this dazzlingly wide-ranging book, Daniel Albright explores the specificities of literature, painting, and music. But far from seeing the arts as locked into their differences, he mounts a brilliant, intricate argument for their mutual translatability and ultimate unity.”― Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres -- Jahan Ramazani “In exploring whether there are many different arts, or if there is one that variously takes different forms, Daniel Albright brilliantly shows how the coming-together and splitting-asunder of artistic media is one of the great stories in the intellectual history of the West.”―Pamela Rosenberg, American Academy in Berlin -- Pamela Rosenberg “Challenging and pleasurable . . . Albright’s affecting prose produces synaesthetic sensations in the reader . . . Albright posits a unique and complex theory . . . forging a new and unique form of art criticism in the process.”—Anna Gallagher-Ross, C Magazine -- Anna Gallagher-Ross ― C Magazine Daniel Albright  is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, and he teaches in the Comparative Literature, English, and Music departments. He is the author of sixteen previous books. He lives in Cambridge, MA. Panaesthetics On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts By DANIEL ALBRIGHT Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2014 Yale University All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-18662-8 Contents Acknowledgments, xi, Introduction: Mousike, 1, Part One: Individual Media, 1. What Is Literature?, 13, 2. What Is Painting?, 46, 3. What Is Music?, 149, Part Two: Art Rampant, 4. Nine Definitions, 209, 5. Wonder and the Sublime, 219, 6. Pseudomorphoses, 234, 7. Comparative Arts: Two Conclusions, 277, Notes, 287, Index, 301, Poetry Credits, 321, CHAPTER 1 What Is Literature? In Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme , M. Jourdain is delighted to discover that he has been speaking prose all his life without even knowing it. Similarly, we might say that we have been writing literature all our lives: since literature just means letters , even a shopping list or a set of instructions for feeding the cat is in the largest sense literature. But we usually reserve the term for something more portentous or pretentious. The Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses are certainly literature; the novels of Norman Mailer are probably literature; Harlequin romances are possibly literature, at least according to advanced literary-critical thought; today's edition of the New York Times is marginally literature. The main criterion is, Will it continue to be read for a long time? Textual longevity can arise from many sources, from urgency of content to rhetorical splendor. When Ezra Pound defined literature as news that stays news, he was creating a content-based definition: what Homer has to tell us about faithfulness, what Tolstoy has to tell us about adultery, what Goethe has to tell us about intellectual presumption, what the author of Job has to tell us about suffering are matters that will engage our attention for the foreseeable future. The same is true about certain works of nonfiction, such as Adam Smith's and Karl Marx's analyses of the ways society is shaped not for the con