The relation between painting and poetry in Walcott's work has been explored by a number of critics including Edward Baugh, Robert Bensen and Clara de Rosa Lima. This essay develops their observations about painters and painting in Walcott's early poetry by considering the interplay between the visual and the visionary in his more recent Tiepolo's Hound (2000). Considering how the poem explores the sublime, the essay asks what effect Walcott's response to aesthetics has on the traditional agenda of post-colonial politics.