title: Annunciations to Anyone: The Disclosure of Authority in Writing and Painting (Literature and the Visual Arts)
author: Prof. John W. Erwin
description: Applied Deconstructivism at its best. (Claude Gandelman, Literary Research)<BR>
zlib_text: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
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  # PEN, PENCIL AND POISON: A Study in Green
  
  
  ### Oscar Wilde
  
  
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  IT has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of
  letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. As a
  rule this must necessarily be so. That very concentration of vision and
  intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament
  is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the
  beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many
  exceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state
  councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic
  office in his own city; the humorists, essayists, and novelists of modern
  America seem to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic
  representatives of their country; and Charles Lamb's friend, 