Introduction.    The engaging eye: Ekphrasis and twentieth-century poetry

You are worried that you don’t write?

Don’t be. It’s the tribute of the air that

your paintings don’t just let go

of you. And what poet ever sat down

in front of a Titian, pulled out

his versifying tablet and began

to drone? Don’t complain, my dear,

You do what I can only name.

(Frank O’Hara, “To Larry Rivers,” 1955)¹

Admire, when you come here, the glimmering hair

Of the girl; praise her pale

Complexion. Think well of her dress

Though that is somewhat out of fashion.

Don’t try to take her hand, but smile for

Her hesitant gentleness.

(W. D. Snodgrass, “VUILLARD: ‘The Mother and Sister of the Artist,’ ” 1960–1961)²

This book takes up one prominent aspect of twentieth-century poetry’s varied and intense involvement with the visual arts: ekphrasis, the poem that addresses a work of art. Specifically, this book is about the social dynamics of ekphrasis; about the complex, changing and various relations among poet, work of art, and audience that structure the ekphrastic poem; and about how ekphrastic poetry, by means of those relations, opens the lyric into a network of social engagements within and across the boundaries of the poem. The book began in a fascination with the workings of modern ekphrasis and with a question: Why did so many modern poets, with such attention and such conflicted self-consciousness, turn to painting and sculpture as subjects for their poems? Why does this subgenre of the lyric occur so frequently in Anglo-American poetry in the twentieth century, used by so many poets, often repeatedly and to produce their best work? From W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” and “Lapis Lazuli,” through W. H. Auden’s “Musée des

If the record of ekphrastic production can be a measure, images are more urgent in the twentieth century than ever before. The intimacy and necessity McClatchy identifies pervades modern ekphrasis, the “quickenings” of love and friendship, the “passings to and fro” of a life-sustaining connection among artists. “I am alone on the surface/ of a turning planet. What// to do but, like Michelangelo’s/ Adam, put my hand/ out into unknown space,/ hoping for the reciprocating touch?” asked R. S. Thomas, himself looking to Michelangelo.⁶ As in O’Hara’s “To Larry Rivers” above, direct address to the artist registers that connection in many modern ekphrases, companionable, contentious, desiring, admiring: “and all the while you knew/ what you dared to acknowledge only in oils,” says Richard Howard to Henri Fantin-Latour; “Can you stand it,/ Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?” Ashbery asks Parmagianino; “You were more interested/ in her swinging baroque tits/ and the space between her thighs/ than the expression on her face,” Vicki Feaver accuses Roger Hilton.⁷

The twentieth century’s various pan-arts avant-gardes and their multi-disciplinary manifestos (Dada, vorticism, futurism, surrealism) speak to

Why, among the arts, such interest in images in particular as subject matter for poems? This book will suggest a number of reasons, but two, I think, predominate. First, poets, like the rest of us, look at images because they are everywhere. The widespread presence of ekphrasis in twentieth-century poetry can be understood as both a response to and a participant in what W. J. T. Mitchell has called “the pictorial turn” from a culture of words into a culture of images that began in the late nineteenth century with the advent of photography and then film, and has accelerated since the mid twentieth century with the invention of television and, now, digital media.¹⁴ Excited – and haunted – by a sense of images’ increasing

At the heart of twentieth-century ekphrasis is this growing familiarity of works of art among a broad reading public. Poets write on a Van Gogh or Brueghel or Monet or Hopper aware that those works are available to the eye and the mind’s eye of an audience. As I’ll argue in Chapters 2 (Brueghel) and 3 (Van Gogh), ekphrasis has both increased and tapped the cultural currency of the images it engages, and helped shape the debate about them. When Anne Sexton writes on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, for example, she appeals to wide-spread familiarity with the image and enters into the popular debate about madness and artistic genius that centered on Van Gogh. Paul Durcan’s 1991 volume of poems on the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland rose to the top of the best-seller list and sold 20,000 copies in Dublin in two months. There’s an audience beyond the usual poetry readers interested in a poet’s take on images, and not just in Ireland.

Along with the deep pleasure and the sense of excitement and possibility for poetry in being involved with images comes the nagging sense that pictures have something that words do not – and an underlying fear that the power to shape culture is passing from one medium to another. Modern poems on works of art are fraught with mixed emotions about images. McClatchy’s sense of painting as a dying parent or concealed lover gets at a complex, ambivalent feeling that the visual arts are an intimate, pressing bodily presence in the next room. Ekphrasis is an emphatically deictic mode: “Here,” says Snodgrass above, indicating how tightly the space of the painting binds to his own. “See,” “Look” are frequent imperatives of the pointing poet. From early Pound and the imagists to the post-language poets, poets have seen in works of art an immediacy, a presence, a “hereness” that they have wanted for words, but that they suspect words can only gesture toward. “The writer will always envy the

The second major reason for the prevalence of ekphrasis in twentieth-century poetry arises from the particular resources of the genre itself, beginning with its given structure. Writing on a work of art differs from writing on a natural object in that the work of art constitutes a statement already made about/in the world. As the staging of the relation between words and images, poet and artist, ekphrasis is inherently dialogic. What Mary Ann Caws calls the “afterness” of ekphrasis, which sometimes translates as a sense of belatedness, is also the fundamental relatedness of ekphrasis.¹⁸ The ekphrastic poet always responds to someone else’s work. The poet who would write on a work of art, says James Merrill, must “listen for its opening words.”¹⁹ Ekphrasis is a mode of poetry that, by its very nature, opens out of lyric subjectivity into a social world. In the twentieth century, it has been one means of making the lyric, the dominant poetic mode, more flexible; of expanding lyric subjectivity into a field that includes at least one other, the artist/work of art, with a third always present and sometimes active in the exchange, the audience. What we might call the “ekphrastic situation” – the poet engaging the work of art and representing it to an audience – contains at least three participants. In arguing for the key role of the Victorian “literature of art” in the transition from Romanticism to modernism, Richard Stein pointed to the dynamics this triangle introduced into the lyric: “the writer now mediates between an external object, an acknowledged personal perspective on it, and a felt need to create a new public context of values.”²⁰ The importance of the audience’s role to a revitalized poetry became increasingly important in the

Richard Wilbur’s “A Dutch Courtyard” (1947), a witty send-up of the ekphrastic situation, exposes the urgency of the social relations inherent in ekphrasis and suggests what the stakes can be:

A Dutch Courtyard

What wholly blameless fun

To stand and look at pictures. Ah, they are

Immune to us. This courtyard may appear

To be consumed with sun,

Most mortally to burn,

Yet it is quite beyond the reach of eyes

Or thoughts, this place and moment oxidize;

This girl will never turn,

Cry what you dare, but smiles

Tirelessly toward the seated cavalier,

Who will not proffer you his pot of beer;

And your most lavish wiles

Can never turn this chair

To proper uses, nor your guile evict

These tenants. What surprising strict

Propriety! In despair,

Consumed with greedy ire,

Old Andrew Mellon glowered at this Dutch

Courtyard, until it bothered him so much

He bought the thing entire.

²³

So, out of the ekphrastic situation, the simple, “blameless fun” of looking at pictures, balloon big issues of life and art. The ekphrastic poet, the poem implies, comes to the painting seeking friendship, fun, a little flirtation: in short, connection to others in a world that seems warmer and more certain than his own, only to find it indifferent to him. “That simpler world from which we’ve been evicted,” is how Sassoon similarly described the scene in an English landscape.²⁴ This is the cry of nostalgic modernity, uttered with all the shock of the new in Sassoon’s case, satirized, though acknowledged, in Wilbur’s. With one foot often in the past, ekphrasis can thus dramatize in social terms the relation of the present to the past in an age in which that past seems to beckon, only to turn its back.

Looking is not, never has been, ethically neutral, and ekphrasis stages relations lived under that fact.²⁵ Wilbur’s poem tackles directly this underlying condition of ekphrasis. Whether looking serves truth out of which right action grows or is proprietary and invasive (itself an act of transgression) troubles the moderns: “What wholly blameless fun,” Wilbur mocks our willfully innocent desire to look.²⁶ Ethically charged, too, is the collecting that begat the modern art museum out of which this and most modern ekphrases come. With the poem’s language of property, Wilbur tests the relation between art and material possession which his choice of ekphrastic object reinforces: Dutch genre scenes such as De Hooch’s were painted for a booming art market in a newly independent country of merchants and farmers, eager to exercise their buying power and to have their national identity reflected and validated in paint. Acutely aware of his situation both physically (in the National Gallery in Washington, DC) and ethically, Wilbur knows that he and Mellon (the Gallery’s founder) are allied in the “greedy ire” with which they set out to possess the object of desire.

“A Dutch Courtyard” plays to the hilt the gendering of poet and work of art that has been taken as a hallmark of ekphrasis by recent commentators: the observing male poet gazing on the feminized image and wanting his way with her.²⁷ Mellon and Wilbur are outrageously, stereotypically, male, intent on seducing and finally possessing the resolutely independent females in the image, and the recalcitrant feminized image. The “guile” and

Wilbur’s poem also plays up the self-reflexive nature of ekphrasis: writing on a work of art becomes a way of looking sideways at poetry. “A Dutch Courtyard” dramatizes the relation of the poet to his materials, laying bare and thematizing, again in social terms, what the poet does with the objects he contemplates, and how those objects respond. Wilbur’s gallery-goer/poet is caught between resistant material and his own desire to “make” something of it. If we as readers consult the originating images (sometimes even presented to us on the page with the poem), ekphrasis often allows us to see for ourselves how the poet has treated his subjects.

Ekphrasis occurs early, middle and late in the century, and crosses the stylistic spectrum. I want to suggest that the prevalence of ekphrasis indicates continuous and ongoing efforts across the century to break open the possibilities of lyric poetry. In his influential account of the transformation of modern to contemporary American poetry (1984), James Breslin located an “opening of the field” of poetry in the work produced in the 1950s by five loose groups exemplified by Allen Ginsberg (Beats), Robert Lowell (confessionals), Denise Levertov (Black Mountain), Frank O’Hara (New York School) and James Wright (Deep Image): “with the shattering of the hermetically sealed autotelic poem, American poetry broke open to the physical moment – the literal, the temporal, the immediate.”²⁸ Breslin talks in terms of a mid-century “breakthrough” from fixed forms to open, processual free verse that exposes the material nature of language. But the desire to open the field of the lyric poem (never so enclosed or monolithic as Breslin represents it, in any case) crosses the stylistic divide he constructs and is pursued by other means as well. It lies behind the prevalence of ekphrasis. In focusing on a work of art, ekphrasis, by its very nature, does what Breslin’s shattered autotelic poem does, “acknowledge[s] an immediate external reality that remains stubbornly other.”²⁹ The ekphrastic poem is all about that otherness, and about how one engages it. While Richard Wilbur, with his persistent formalism, represents what Breslin’s postwar American experimenters supposedly break through from, “A Dutch Courtyard” nevertheless shows Wilbur dramatizing, and accepting, the otherness of an irrefutable external reality

The inherently social dynamics of ekphrasis and its possibilities for polyvocality made it especially attractive to a postmodernism alive to the multiplicity of the lyric subject and to racial, ethnic and gender differences. Art historian Michael Fried’s analysis of the rise of minimalist art in the 1960s is relevant here. In his famous 1967 essay “Art and objecthood,” Fried argues that minimalist art (or, as he prefers, “literalist” art), as exemplified by the sculpture of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, is “theatrical” in that “it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.”³³ It understands the work of art as an object and is principally concerned with the relation of the beholder to that object: “the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”³⁴ For Fried, the theatrical is a matter of “experience, conviction, sensibility.”³⁵ While the object of contemplation in ekphrasis is rarely the minimalist object with which Fried is concerned, ekphrasis itself might be understood as displaying this theatrical sensibility in its basic staging of the encounter. If minimalist theatricality speaks to and expresses a widespread sensibility in the second half of the century, the proliferation of ekphrasis can be seen as evidence and expression of that sensibility.³⁶

Whereas Fried’s analysis leads him to see a sharp opposition between the modernist (non-theatrical) and the postmodern (at least as exemplified by theatrical literalist art), the study of ekphrasis suggests threads of continuity and connection. Efforts to distinguish a postmodern ekphrasis in opposition to a modernist ekphrasis tend to occlude the record of relation across the century. Marianne Moore’s ekphrastic practice – wry, disruptive, interrupted – may have more in common with Ashbery’s than with Yeats’s, and Yeats’s is more various and less iconically monumental than it is commonly represented as being (see “Leda and the Swan” [1925] and “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” [1920], for example). Ekphrasis’ postmodern development leads back through the moderns to the nineteenth century. The study of ekphrasis, then, suggests a view of twentieth-century poetry in which postmodernist practice built on certain aspects of modernism even as it diverged from others, and in which modernism displays tendencies and features later associated with postmodernism.³⁷