Footnote 12, Chapter 7, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
In his analysis of these pages, Landow shows that Turner used allegory deliberately and consistently throughout his career and probably had acquaintance with many of the poets Ruskin cites (pp. 434-442). See also Charles Dougherty's essay connecting the Turner paintings to Ruskin's later mythopoeia. The vision of Modern Painters V, he says, is "of a universe in which chaos is victor over harmony, the desert and the sea over the garden, the serpent over the woman, and death over life. . . By 1860 he had come to see the chaotic liberal, democratic world as a manifestation of the Fall, and he saw every bit of harmony, at any level, even a single work of art, as a precious manifestation of the Redemption" ("Of Ruskin's Gardens," in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Northrop Frye et al. [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963], 143).
Last modified December 2000