A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

The interior landscape, however, moves naturally towards the principle of multiple perspectives as in the first two lines of The Waste Land, where the Christian Chaucer, Sir James Frazer, and Jessie Weston are simultaneously present. This is “cubist perspective” which renders, at once, a diversity of views with the spectator always in the center of the picture, whereas in picturesque art the spectator is always outside. The cubist perspective of interior landscape typically permits an immediacy, a variety and solidity of experience denied in the picturesque and to Tennyson.
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” (1955), in Essays in Criticism, Vol 1, No 3, July (1951), p 281-282, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 155
Year: 1955
↪ Also at #1435, #5221
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan