Criminal Ingenuity offers both a history and a theory of the conflicted relation between poetry and painting in high and mid-century modernism, focusing on figures like T.S. Eliot, Clement Greenberg, Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, and Joseph Cornell. Essential reading for scholars of modernism and inter-arts comparisons, this wide-ranging study reframes mid-century modernism as a power struggle between poetry and painting. The three protagonists emerge not as victors in the struggle but as bystanders whose 'criminal ingenuity' resists the commodification and institutionalization of their respective arts.