thumb|Ut Pictura Poesis, by [[Charles François Hutin]]
Ut pictura poesis is an often-repeated Latin phrase, literally "as is painting so is poetry," which occurs most famously near the end of Horace's Ars Poetica. Horace meant that poetry (in its widest sense, "imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting.
Some centuries before, Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 – 468 BC) had stated, "," meaning "Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry." Throughout history, this claim has attracted spirited dispute. Plato found painting and writing to be unreliable sources of understanding since they simulated a false reality, and thus disregarded these practices entirely. In the Renaissance, a controversy arose over which of the two forms was superior, and it was concluded that painting took precedence because sight outranked hearing in the hierarchy of the senses. This resembles another heated debate at the time, the paragone, which opposed painting to sculpture.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing opens his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) by observing that "the first who compared painting with poetry [Simonides of Ceos] was a man of fine feeling," though, Lessing makes it clear, not a critic or philosopher. Lessing argues that painting is a synchronic, visual phenomenon, one of space that is immediately in its entirety understood and appreciated, while poetry (again, in its widest sense) is a diachronic art of the ear, one that depends on time to unfold itself for the reader's appreciation. He recommends that poetry and painting should not be confused, and that they are best practiced and appreciated "As two equitable friendly neighbouring states."
Commenting on the significance of the phrase "ut pictura poesis", Leon Golden states:
W. J. T. Mitchell trenchantly observed that "We tend to think that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth."
In Horace's Ars Poetica, the phrase "ut pictura poesis" comes immediately after another famous quotation "", literally "even Homer nods", an indication that even the most skilled poet can compose inferior verse.
Alexander Pope
18th-century British poet Alexander Pope was partial to ut pictura poesis. He considered both painting and poetry to be equals, and "it can easily be seen that he held that there was a close relationship between the art of poetry and the art of painting, especially perhaps since such a relationship combined the two arts of which he was a practitioner." There is note of Pope finding himself "in a larger context of a continuous line of poetic pictorialism".</blockquote>
There is an emphasis on the reader's eye and the imagery that contributed to audience members being able to so vividly 'watch' the plot of this poem unfold.