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“I did not sit down to be a poet, or to prove an aesthetic point. They simply emerged, starting on a plane to Japan when I could not sleep properly. After two hours of being half asleep and half awake, the first poem, about a third index finger, began to come through I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it down I found it rather funny. Some writers routinely compose – Anthony Burgess, Paul (The Sheltering Sky) Bowles, and even the ineffable Roger Scruton. And many composers handle words with as much facility as they do notes: Wagner was his own librettist (alas), and so (again alas) was Michael Tippett.

For Robert Schumann, his music criticism read like theatre, and when he described his own works, the poetic muse was always in attendance. “It seemed as though flowers and gods were coming out of my fingers,” he wrote of his playing, after a successful amorous encounter with Clara. For this bewildered genius, all music was metaphor.
What are we to make of Alfred Brendel, who gave his new collection of poems their inaugural reading in Cheltenham yesterday? For if these bagatelles have a leitmotiv it is laughter – as a liberating, disruptive, regenerative force “At one stage in my life,” he says, “I didn’t laugh enough. There’s nothing fair about the way talent is handed out – to those who have, more is given – but music is a talent that does not combine easily. We know about music and mathematics, and music and chess: Francois Andre Philidor wrote operas with one hand and chess treatises with the other, and the Russian pianist Mark Taimanov spends his holidays officiating as a chess grandmaster But music and painting? Few composers have bridged that gap

With music and literature we’re on firmer ground. Three Standing Figures, 77ins tall, laminated birch: pounds 40,000.

Large Head, 8ft tall, bronze, edition of three: pounds 40,000.Julian Sainsbury, sculpture, until 23 October (Mon-Fri, 10am-5.30pm) at Browse and Darby, 19 Cork Street, London W1 (0171-734 7984). Indian Boy, 6in tall bronze head, edition of seven: pounds 850. Standing Bronze Figure, 23ins tall, edition of four: pounds 1,500. Others, such as his three standing figures in laminated birch, which are pinning their arms to their sides, have horizontal sections, giving the illusion of being bound.

He uses horizontal sections for heads, imparting a settled, more refined quality.Prices: Pebble Head, 5in tall cast iron maquette, edition of 20: pounds 250. (A giant head cast in fibreglass, too big for Browse and Darby’s Cork Street gallery, is on show on the forecourt of the nearby Museum of Mankind). Most recently, his life-size figures have been carved from plywood cross-sections. The cross-sections are scaled up by computer from bronze maquettes.Some of his standing wooden figures have plywood sections that are vertical, imparting a vibrant, organic quality. The figures are a bit like a blank canvas.”But he gives a clue if you ask him why they are all male: “Because I’m male and they are all exploring my emotions.”After studying ceramics at Cardiff College of Art, Sainsbury began using internal armatures to support thin clay figures that were later cast in bronze. But the eyes and ears, especially of his later work, are naturalistic and unresolved.As for the elongation of the bodies, it is a Sainsbury signature – but nevertheless reminiscent of the early Renaissance figure that epitomises the blending of the classical and the naturalistic – Donatello’s bronze of a lanky, nude David.Who are these people? Sainsbury is reticent.