T.C

ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ

SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ

BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATLARI

İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI

A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF EKPHRASTIC

POETRY IN ENGLISH

PhD Dissertation

Berkan ULU

Ankara-2010

T.C

ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ

SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ

BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATLARI

İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI

A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF EKPHRASTIC

POETRY IN ENGLISH

PhD Dissertation

Berkan ULU

Advisor

Asst.Prof.Dr.Nazan TUTAŞ

Ankara-2010

T.C

ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ

SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ

BATI DİLLERİ VE EDEBİYATLARI

İNGİLİZ DİLİ VE EDEBİYATI

A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF EKPHRASTIC

POETRY IN ENGLISH

PhD Dissertation

Advisor : Asst. Prof. Dr. Nazan TUTAŞ

Members of the PhD Committee

Name and Surname Signature

Prof. Dr. Belgin ELBİR ........................................

Prof. Dr. Ufuk Ege UYGUR ........................................

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lerzan GÜLTEKİN ........................................

Asst. Prof. Dr. Nazan TUTAŞ (Advisor) .........................................

Asst. Prof. Dr. Trevor HOPE .........................................

Date ..................................

TÜRKİYE CUMHURİYETİ

ANKARA ÜNİVERSİTESİ

SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ MÜDÜRLÜĞÜNE

Bu belge ile, bu tezdeki bütün bilgilerin akademik kurallara ve etik davranış

ilkelerine uygun olarak toplanıp sunulduğunu beyan ederim. Bu kural ve ilkelerin

gereği olarak, çalışmada bana ait olmayan tüm veri, düşünce ve sonuçları andığımı ve

kaynağını gösterdiğimi ayrıca beyan ederim.(……/……/200…)

……………………………………

Berkan ULU

ABSTRACT

“A Stylistic Anlaysis of Ekphrastic Poetry in English” covers ekphrasis in English

from its early beginnings in the antiquity to the present in order to find out about

literary and stylistic characteristics of this thousand-year-old tradition through

stylistic analyses. Because there are only a few detailed studies on the development

of ekphrasis as a literary device, the study also offers new terminology and

classifications when needed. In order to discover the relationship between the visual

and the verbal, the study first introduces a brief history of ekphrasis in the

Introduction followed by an in-depth critical and philosophical survey of the tradition

that will be dealt with in Chapter I. In this section, concepts like meditative

ekphrasis, imitative ekphrasis, dead ekphrasis, paragonal relationship, ergon,

parergon, and deparagonal relationship have been introduced and explained and

these key points have been exemplified and referred to in the following sections. The

study also suggests essential points about the definition and etymology of the word

ekphrasis and explicates some new conceptual points before moving on to theoretical

assumptions. Chapter I, which focuses on the theoretical background of the tradition,

puts forward a historical categorisation based on the essential turning points the

ekphrasis tradition has undergone and concludes that there are three ekphrastic

phases. Beginning from Chapter II, each chapter deals with these ekphrastic phases

with reference to the most representative examples of ekphrastic poetry from

iv

Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles to Ben Jonson’s “The Mind of the

Frontispiece to a Book,” and from Wordsworth’s “Peele Castle” to W.H. Auden’s

“Museé des Beaux Arts.” Each chapter begins and ends with an overall analysis of

the tradition in that particular phase while Conclusion chapter covers the results of

applied stylistic analyses as well as the general characteristics of ekphrasis as a

literary phenomenon. Consequently, through stylistic analysis and critical

appreciation of representative ekphrastic poems in English, this study aims to re-visit

ekphrasis within modern theoretical norms and concludes that ekphrasis, which has

experienced various literary, intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and most essentially

paragonal shifts, is a well-established and invaluable literary device for poets of all

ages.

v

ÖZET

“İngiliz Dili’ndeki Ekfrastik Şiirin Biçembilimsel Bir İncelemesi” şeklinde

Türkçeleştirilebilecek bu çalışma İngilizce yazılmış veya İngilizce’ye çevrilmiş

ekfrastik şiirlerin Biçembilimsel incelemesini yaparak bin yılı aşkın süredir devam

etmekte olan ekfrasis1 geleneğini inceleyerek, bu geleneğin temel özelliklerini ortaya

çıkartmayı amaçlamaktadır. Giriş bölümünde ekfrasisin tarihi gelişimi kısaca

aktarılmış daha sonra da bu terimin tanımlanmasına ilişkin sorunlara ve önerilere yer

verilmiş ve sonuç olarak daha kapsamlı bir tanım önerilmiştir. Bu bölümde ayrıca

“ekphrasis” kelimesinin etimolojik kökeni, kullanım rahatlığı ve terminolojik

gerekliliği göz önünde bulundurularak, bu alanda yapılan çalışmalarda kullanılmak

üzere henüz İngilizce’de bulunmayan “ekphrasize” fiili önerilmiş, örneklenmiş ve

tanıtılmıştır. Çalışmanın Birinci Bölümü daha çok ekfrasis geleneği hakkında

yapılmış felsefi, eleştirel ve edebi tartışmalara yer vermiştir. Antik Çağ, Rönesans ve

sonrası, ve modern dönemlerde yapılan teorik çalışmalar açıklandıktan sonra, bu

çalışmalar ışığında ve modern şiir normları çerçevesinde geliştirilmiş meditative

ekphrasis (esinci ekfrasis), mimetic ekphrasis (taklitçi ekfrasis), dead ekphrasis (ölü

ekfrasis), paragonal ve deparagonal ilişki, ergon ve parergon gibi edebi ve teorik

teoremler öne sürülmüş, tartışılmış ve ileriki bölümlerde de örneklenmiştir.

1 Her ne kadar değerli hocamız Yrd. Doç. Özlem Uzundemir İmgeyi Konuşturmak başlıklı kitabında ekphrasis

terimini oldukça başarılı bir fonolojik etki yakalayarak resimbetim olarak Türkçeleştirmeye çalışmışsa da, bu

çalışmanın teorik bölümlerinde de tartışıldığı gibi, ekfrasis sadece “resim” sanatını betimlemediğinden, Özet

bölümünde, ekphrasis terimi, “ekfrasis” şeklinde, Türkçe yazılışıyla kullanılacak ve Latince, Fransızca, ve

İtalyanca’dan geçmiş bir çok edebi terim gibi aslına bağlı kalınarak kullanılacaktır.

vi

Ekfrasisin tarihi ve edebi gelişimi göz önünde bulundurularak, bu eski edebi terim

için üç ana tarihsel dönem önerilmiş ve İkinci Bölüm’den başlamak üzere bu

dönemler örneklerle detaylı bir biçimde incelenip analiz edilmiştir. Homeros’un

Aşil’in Kalkanı betimlemesinden, W.H.Auden’ın “Museé des Beaux Arts” adlı

şiirine, farklı dönemlerden seçilmiş birçok ekfrastik şiir Biçembilimsel yöntemlerle

incelenmiştir. Çalışmanın teorik altyapısının açıklandığı bölümlerde belirtildiği gibi

Biçembilimsel inceleme yapısı gereği çok detaylı olduğu ve uzun sürebildiği için,

önceleme (foregrounding), parallel yapılar (parallelism) ve sapma (deviation) gibi

Biçembilim’in şiir incelemesinde kullanılabilecek önemli özelliklerine ve

kavramlarına yoğunlaşılmıştır. Bu bağlamda incelemeler sırasında özellikle resim ve

şiir arasındaki yapısal parallellikler, kelime bilimsel ve cümle bilimsel açılardan

öncelenmiş kelime ve yapılar, noktalama ve yazım üslubundaki farklılıklar

incelenmiş ve ekfrasisin tarihi boyunca çeşitli değişiklikler geçirerek üç ana

dönemden geçmiş olduğu kanıtlanmaya çalışılmıştır. Biçembilimsel analizin yanında

tarihi ve edebi gelişmeler de göz önünde bulundurularak şiirler ve dönemler

birbirleriyle eşleştirilerek, bu köklü geleneğin temel özellikleri, şiirsel etkisi ve

paragonal eğilimleri incelenmiştir. Sonuç olarak ekfrasisin Antik çağlardan

günümüze kadar çeşitli gelişmeler ve değişiklikler gösterdiği ve bu bulguların hem

ekfrasis kavramı hem de şiir tarihi hakkında önemli ipuçları verdiği kanısına

varılmıştır.

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If I could paint a picture of those without whose contributions this work would not

have been possible, I would need to paint a crowded Brueghel-like painting and that

painting would not be complete without a smiling image of my advisor, Asst. Prof.

Dr. Nazan Tutaş. I am grateful for her support, patience, understanding, and above

all, kind-heartedness. I would draw Prof. Dr. Belgin Elbir, as a motherly figure

cherishing the young, and Asst. Prof. Dr. Trevor Hope, as a figure in contemplation

sitting by a river. Without their help, God knows where this work would have led. I

would draw the committee members, Prof. Dr. Sema Ege, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lerzan

Gültekin, and Prof. Dr. Ufuk Ege Uygur, around a long wooden table talking about

something important. I thank them all for their understanding and kind suggestions.

Then I would paint Asst. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Şahiner (with a torch in his hand) along

with my friends and colleagues at DTCF (Dr. Fahri Öz, Asst. Prof. Dr. Sıla Şenlen,

and all) as figures holding out a basket full of cigarettes, coffee beans, and candies.

My friend Taner Can would occupy a great space and I would draw him as a strong

man riding a chariot, probably running away from me. He has been kind (and

patient) enough to listen to my grumbles and lengthy speeches. I owe him so much.

My family (Ergün Güzel, Ayşe Güzel, Bülent Sait Ulu, Mükerrem Ulu, Gürkan Ulu,

Bilkan Ulu, Erbil Güzel, Ümit Güzel, Elif Güzel, Erdem Güzel, and all other

members of the Güzels and the Ulus) would be drawn as birds building a huge nest. I

viii

thank them all for evethything they have provided for me and they all deserve a big

hug.

However the central figures of the painting would be my wife, Çiğdem, and my

daughter, Dora. I would draw them as rain clouds – they know I hate sunshine. They

pour rain; water feeds the ground; and the earth smells good. They give life and

meaning to everything I do. I do not need to paint myself in the picture for they stand

for everything I am – for we are one and the picture is complete.

ix

TABLE of CONTENTS

Cover Pages ….………... Cover Pages

PhD Committee Page ….………... i

Dilekçe ….………... ii

Abstract ….………... iii

Özet ….………... v

Acknowledgements ….………... vii

Table of Contents ….………... ix

Introduction ….………... 1

1.1. Ekphrasis: Commencement and Definitions ….………... 5

1.2. A Brief History of the Ekphrastic Tradition ….………... 13

1.3. “Stilvs Virvm Argvit:” Stylistics ….………... 24

1.4. Stylistics and Ekphrasis ….………... 38

1.5. Thesis ….………... 43

Chapter I: “Ut Pictura Poesis” ….………... 48

2.1. “Ut Pictura Poesis:” The Nature of Ekphrasis ….………... 49

2.2. The Sisterhood: Sisters or Antagonists? ….………... 62

2.3. Mimesis and Ekphrasis ….………... 75

2.4. Modern Theories on Ekphrasis ….………... 83

x

2.5. “Ce n‟est avec des Idées… C‟est avec des

Mots:” Ekphrasis, Ekphrastic Tradition,

Stylistics, and Theorems

….………...

107

Chapter II: The Ekphrastic Debut: Ekphrasis

until the Romantics

….………...

122

3.1. Early Examples: Ekphrasis from Homer to the

Renaissance

….………...

124

3.2. Enter Ekphrasis: Ekphrasis in England ….………... 143

3.3. Painter Poems: “„Paint this, Draw that‟” ….………... 156

3.4. Ben Jonson: “The Mind of the Frontispiece to a

Book”

….………...

162

3.5. Richard Lovelace: “To My Worthy Friend Mr.

Peter Lilly”

….………...

167

3.6. The Ekphrastic Inheritance ….………... 175

Chapter III: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty:”

Ekphrasis in the Romantic and Victorian Ages

….………...

184

4.1. Sisters Re-United: From the Romantic into the

Victorian

….………...

185

4.2. “Fruitless Task to Paint:” Wordsworth‟s “Peele

Castle”

….………...

197

4.3. The Urn of the Irony: Keats‟s “Ode on a

Grecian Urn”

….………...

208

4.4. Shelley: The Medusa Paradox ….………... 217

xi

4.5. The Victorian Age and the Pre-Raphaelites ….………... 225

4.6. Titian‟s “Venetian,” Rosetti‟s “Giorgione” ….………... 229

4.7. Browning: “I Gave Commands” ….………... 237

4.8. The Legacy: The Tradition Continues ….………... 243

Chapter IV: Modern Ekphrasis ….………... 247

5.1. The Ekphrastic Big-Bang ….………... 249

5.2. Auden: “Museé des Deux Arts” ….………... 258

5.3. William C. Williams: “Man Cannot Think

Without Images”

….………...

271

5.4. Derek Mahon: “The Hunt by Sight” ….………... 281

5.5. John Ashbery and the Mirror Effect ….………... 288

5.6. The New Ekphrastic Voice ….………... 299

Conclusion ….………... 302

6.1. Something New for Something Old ….………... 303

6.2. The First Ekphrastic Phase ….………... 310

6.3. The Second Ekphrastic Phase ….………... 314

6.4. The Third Ekphrastic Phase ….………... 318

6.5. Conclusion ….………... 320

Appendices ….………... 322

Illustrations ….………... 359

Works Cited ….………... 406

To my daughter, Dora

INTRODUCTION

Beginning from the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a growing

interest in and tendency towards interaction and co-operation in different fields of

study, both in arts and in sciences. During such a period of artistic and scientific

encounters, hydro-geologists have begun working with mining engineers and

astronomers, while graphic artists have felt the need to co-work with computer

engineers. The interrelation have also reached across the fields when literary critics

consulted quantum physics to learn more about the reflexive and complex structure

of multi-layered postmodern novels, especially those of the second half of the

twentieth century. The interdisciplinary fondness and the twentieth-century

inclination to favour pastiche, interaction, the trans-textual and the multi-referential

have regenerated the interest in an old artistic tradition, ekphrasis. With over fifty

thousand surviving examples since the antiquity (Bruhn 3) 1

, ekphrasis is an ancient

convention that combines and intersperses painting with poetry in its broadest sense.

As a literary expression, it allows the invigoration of the silent image of paintings

and sculptures by way of poetic language and presents “two imaginations at work” at

the same time (Bosveld).

1 Bruhn‟s statistics is primarily based on ekphrastic poems in Latin and English.

2

Although the entry of ekphrasis has been removed from many contemporary

dictionaries except for Oxford English Dictionary and some of the literary terms

dictionaries (Marsico and Capa 205; Bosveld), the revitalization of ekphrasis

particularly in the last two decades has produced a new way of understanding

ekphrasis along with a considerable number of poetry collections, theoretical articles

and books. In Hollander‟s words, “the gap between word and image has been the

subject of a good deal of contemporary theoretical exploration” (The Gazer’s 6).

Laura M. Sager Eidt, in her 2008 book, Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis

in Literature and Film, reminds us that a search for the word “ekphrasis” in MLA

bibliography results in 468 sources, 177 of which have been produced in the last five

years (9). Subsequently it has been noted that over 50.000 ekphrastic poems have

survived since Homer‟s time (Bruhn 3).

The recent interest in ekphrasis, therefore, has ended up in a spectacular number of

literary and academic practices. Especially in the twentieth-century and particularly

in the United States and continental Europe2, thanks to the works of distinguished

scholars and art critics like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Erwin Panofsky, E.H.

Gombrich, Jacques Derrida, Nelson Goodman, James Heffernan, Jean Hagstrum,

W.J.T. Mitchell, John Hollander, Murray Krieger, and Peter Wagner, ekphrasis has

been rediscovered. The study of ekphrasis has become so popular that it has almost

become a literary “industry” (Scott “Shelley” 316; Heffernan Museum 1). Terry

Blackhawk puts emphasis on the popularity of ekphrasis among poets of the

2 Many of the academic sources on ekphrasis are in English. However, there are also a great number of sources in

German, Spanish, Italian, French and Latin and some of them have not been translated into English, yet.

Therefore, this study has particularly focused on sources in English or English translations of foreign sources

except for some French and Latin sources.

3

twentieth century time by claiming that “an astonishing variety” of ekphrastic poetry

can be found in the work of contemporary poets (3)3. In addition to the quantity of

ekphrastic works, it should be noted that much of the twentieth-century poetic

industry is comparative because it is in the nature of ekphrasis to co-work with visual

arts, archaeology, mythology, history, philology, philosophy and, of course,

literature. Tina Rothenberg, for instance, the former director of VALA (The Society

of Visual Arts and Language Arts) in California, states that they felt the need to

contact jazz musicians, ceramists, bookmakers, sculptors, painters and even PIXAR

animation creators for their programme about ekphrastic practices and galleries

(155). The reason behind the development of such co-operation between literature

and arts, or poetry and painting in particular – an essential point that will be

evaluated in the next chapter – could be explained with subsequent and frequent

encounters between the word and the image. The present day is usually considered as

an “image-driven time” (Gary Shapiro 13), where the verbal is mixed up with the

visual and it is quite difficult to differentiate which is which, or more precisely,

which depends on or springs from which. W.J.T. Mitchell comments on this

“messed-up” status by saying that “there is no doubt that many people think… that

distinction between media, or between verbal and visual images, are being undone”

(Mitchell “Showing” 172). Consequently, it is almost imperative to revisit and

reconsider ekphrasis, one of the oldest rhetorical and literary traditions, within

present forms and thoughts. In Peter Wagner‟s words, “we need more studies, then,

in both visual poetics and ekphrasis to explore those fascinating works that combine

3 Blackhawk focuses on contemporary American poets Mark Strand and Charles Simiz who had devoted an entire

volume of poetry to Edward Hopper and Joseph Cornell respectively (3-7). He also recalls a number of artistic

activities organised by poets, painters or museums. Some of the recent organizations in the United States have

been listed by Kathy Walsh-Piper: Chicago “Looking to Write/Writing to See;” Detroit “Students Writing about

Art;” San Francisco “The Poets in the Galleries;” Santa Barbara “Poetry Month;” Washington DC “Art around

the Corner” (205-207).

4

visual art and prose fiction” (18) and to acquire insight to the ekphrastic conventions

and practices.

Following Wagner‟s suggestion, this study aims to cover the ekphrastic tradition in

English to find out more about this ancient and established convention within

modern perspectives by way of stylistic analysis. The final section of this chapter is

going to restate the scope, the method, and the thematic concerns of this study. But

before re-introducing and explaining the thesis of this study, it is vital to remember

some of the important points about ekphrasis such as its nature, history, and usage as

well as the key concepts of Stylistics and stylistic analysis.

This chapter, therefore, aims to introduce ekphrasis, followed by a brief history of

the term since it is going to play an essential role to recall the origins of the tradition.

However, much of the conceptual and theorertical background of the ekphrastic

problem will be discussed in the next chapter apart from a preliminary groundwork

about Stylistics, the theoretical method of the dissertation, which will be presented in

this chapter. In other words, this chapter, which is intended to be an introduction to

the introduction to the much complicated issue of ekphrasis, prepares the ground for

the ekphrastic theories that have been disputed since antiquity and initiates the thesis

of the dissertation.

5

1.1. Ekphrasis: Commencement and Definitions

The word ekphrasis (also spelled ecphrasis)4 derives from the Greek root phrazien,

meaning “to tell, to pronounce, or to declare.” With the prefix ek-5, meaning “from”

or “out of,” the verb ekphrazein literally means “to speak out, to describe, to tell

someone about something, to depict vividly.” Before ekphrasis became a school

exercise of rhetoric during the fourth and third centuries (BC), its first appearance as

a word was in the writings attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnasus (Wagner 12)6. As

an infinitive (ekphrazein), it first appears in Demetrius, in his On Style in the first

century (BC), meaning “to decorate” or “to adorn” (Krieger Ecphrasis 7-9;

Heffernan Museum 1). However, the term ekphrasis, as it is understood today, is first

mentioned by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (also spelled Keos) (ca. 556-467

BC) in Plutarch‟s De Gloria Atheniensium7 (Lessing xii; Harvey 1; Heffernan 1-2;

Méndez-Ramirez 24). Ceos describes ekphrasis as “poema pictura loquens, picture

poema silens,” roughly translated as “painting is mute poetry and poetry is speaking

picture” (qtd. in Méndez-Ramirez 24) and this dictum of “mute painting–speaking

poetry,” along with Horace‟s proverbial ut pictura poesis, became the motto of the

relationship between the verbal and the visual.

As for the modern definition of ekphrasis, it should first be mentioned that there are

two fundamental approaches. The first one is a more general yet more inclusive

definition of the term. In this broader sense of the term, ekphrasis is regarded as any

4 Many of the contemporary sources like Mitchell, Heffernan, and Hagstrum use the original spelling of the word,

ekphrasis, except for Hollander and Krieger, who prefer to spell the word as ecphrasis. Throughout the study,

rather than the Latinized version (ecphrasis), the original Greek spelling (ekphrasis) will be used. 5 Wagner also mentions the possibilities “ec-“ and “ex-“ and argues for the use of Greek spelling ekphrasis (12). 6 Wagner is probably referring to the root phrazien because otherwise it would be anachronistic to meet the word

ekphrazein after it had been put into practice by the Greek rhetoricians as late as the fifth century (BC). 7 Translated as On the Glory of the Athens. In Chapter 3, Plutarch devotes a considerable amount of space to Ceos

and other the Greek poets of the third and second centuries (BC). Graham argues that the idea of “mute poetry,

speaking picture” was “already commonplace” because it is unlikely to come across such a strong and well-

established idea of ekphrasis in a book that mentions ekphrasis for the first time (467-8).

6

detailed description, literary or non-literary, of any object, artistic or non-artistic but

this definition, usually regarded as the “ancient” one, has not been in use since the

Middle Ages (Verdonk “Painting” 233). An example to this is found in

Hermogenes‟s Progymnasma, where he treats ekphrasis as “an account in detail… of

persons, actions, times, places, seasons and many other things” (qtd. in Baldwin 35).

The older sense of the word8, in time, had been narrowed down to graphikês ergôn

ekphrasis, poetic description of works of visual art, and this second and more precise

approach had been shaped by poets, critics, art historians, and painters in time. In its

modern sense, which is going to be adopted throughout this study, ekphrasis is

attributed to poetry and its spatial and temporal relation to the visual arts.

Commenting on the dramatic change of the perception, John Hollander states

[Ekphrasis] has been until the last decade or so a technical term used by

classicists and historians of art to mean a verbal description of a work of

art, of a scene as rendered, in the work of art, or even of a fictional scene

the description of which unacknowledgedly derives from descriptions of

scenes. In recent literary theory, considerations of ecphrasis have

concerned the ways in which space and time are involved in the various

mutual figurations of actuality, text, and picture (The Gazer’s 5).

Defining ekphrasis within the verbal-visual, or rather word-image, relation seems to

be a problematic issue because there are too many different definitions with minor,

sometimes major, differences. Referring to the change of formulations especially

from the sixteenth-century to the twentieth-century, James Heffernan states that

“begotten nearly two thousand years ago by ancient Greek rhetoricians and lately

8 Some of the recent dictionaries, such as Penguin Dictionary of Literature and the first edition of Oxford

Classical Dictionary, still hold on to the broader definition and regard ekphrasis as any extended and detailed

literary description of any object, real or imaginary. In the second edition of Oxford Classical Dictionary,

however, a more specific entry has replaced the former: “the rhetorical description of a work of art” (Hammond

and Scullard 377).

7

rediscovered by literary theorists, the word ekphrasis has been variously used and

variously defined” (“Entering” 262). Some of the popular and “canonized” literary

definitions of the term will be presented in the following pages to conclude with yet

another all-encompassing, comprehensive and innovative definition of the term in the

modern sense along with an etymological suggestion on the usage of the word.

One of the most acknowledged definitions belongs to Heffernan9, who states that

“the definition must be sharp enough to identify a distinguishable body of literature

and yet also elastic enough to reach from classicism to postmodernism,” describes

ekphrasis briefly as “…the verbal representation of visual representation” (Museum

3)10

. As seen on, Heffernan puts the emphasis on the act of representing, the core of

mimesis. In fact, he further expresses that ekphrastic practice should be

representational because it “represents representation itself” (ibid. 4). Heffernan‟s

simple and clear-cut definition has been adopted by many critics such as Mitchell

(Picture 151-152), Scott (“The Rhetoric” 301), Krieger (The Play 110), Kurman (1),

Schmeling (80), Bergmann (2), DuBois (3), Blackhawk (1), and Dundas (15). It

could even be claimed that the proceeding definitions have essentially followed,

imitated, and sometimes modified Heffernan‟s definition11

. A copycat definition, for

instance, reads “verbal re-creations of the visual artwork” (Wagner 11; Carrier

Principles 8, 104). John Graham thinks that ekphrasis is “essentially a rhetorical

device in which an object formed in one art becomes the matter for another” (467)

9 Before defining the term, Heffernan first puts emphasis on his disagreement with Krieger, who considers

ekphrasis as something that freezes time in space, and with Wendy Steiner, who claims that ekphrasis aspires the

“pregnant moment” in texts (Steiner 13-14). Further discussions on the time-space and “pregnant moment”

problems will be presented in the following chapter. 10 Original emphasis. 11 Hefferenan‟s definition has become so established that some of the sources do not even refer to or quote

Heffernan‟s book although they use the same definition as Heffernan has formulated it such as Frederic

Burwick‟s Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections (107).

8

while Siglind Bruhn calls it “a description of art or a work of art in various poetic

styles” (15). For Marsico and Capa ekphrasis denotes “responding intellectually and

emotionally to art” (204) and for Braida and Prieri “ekphrasis explores the

interrelationship between the verbal and the visual, and the enduring legacy of the

ekphrastic tradition” (18). Some of the definitions focus on the ekphrastic function to

create a visual image in words before the listener‟s or audience‟s inner eye. Scott, for

instance, claims that “formally speaking, ekphrasis is any description which brings a

person, a place, or thing visually before the mind‟s eye” (“Shelley” 315). Similarly

A.S. Becker believes that ekphrasis has been treated “as a symbol of a fundamental

goal of poetry: an attempt to represent in words the physical presence, the natural

resemblance to its referent, and the still moment of the visual arts” (5). While A.M

Sumi defines ekphrasis as a “precise description, regardless of its object… [to

achieve] pictorial vividness… before the listener‟s mental eye” (7), Piltz and Åström,

correspondingly claim that “ekphrasis is a descriptive discourse that clearly brings

before our eyes the things, persons or actions depicted… [It] is a word-picture”

(50)12

.

Critics with Linguistics origins prefer to concentrate on linguistic, semiotic, and

stylistic aspects of ekphrasis. Michael Riffaterre, whose works on linguistics and

semiotics have received much appreciation in the last two decades, conceives

ekphrasis as “…transfer of a sign from one level of discourse to another” (Semiotics

47). For Spitzer, likewise, ekphrasis is a reconstruction of a new sign system

reproduced “through the medium of words” (72). Becker draws attention to the

12 See Appendix I for more definitions of ekphrasis.

9

textuality of the concept when he treats ekphrasis as a kind of “mise en abîme, a

miniature replica of a text embedded within that text; a textual part reduplicating,

reflecting, or mirroring (one or more than one aspect of) the textual whole” (4).

While ekphrasis is a “mise en abîme” for Becker, it is an “intertextual mimesis” for

Smith, who believes that the two essential qualities of ekphrasis are textual

correspondence and coherence (22). Peter Verdonk, too, who is one of the rare

scholars to have studied ekphrasis within stylistic perspective, defines the concept as

an amalgamation of and communication between two sign systems and “a sub-genre

of poetry addressing existent or imaginary works of art” (“Painting” 231).

The emphasis on the semiotic, textual, and structural levels of the issue in the above

definitions is quite understandable. However, regarding all the accounts presented so

far, an essential but missing point should be kept in mind while defining the term.

Nearly all of the canonized definitions need to be reconsidered, and maybe

reconstructed, with the aesthetic qualities of the observed object as well as the end

product. It is clear that ekphrasis suggests the recreation of a target object only if the

target object has artistic value. No ekphrastic poem has dealt with a mundane,

invaluable article; whether it is an ancient urn, a stylishly designed armour, or a da

Vinci painting, the subjects of ekphrastic poetry are inventions of artistry or

craftsmanship. Besides, viewer‟s involvement in the artistic aura of the object is still

another artistic act. Louis Marin, who believes that contemplating before the picture

produces great feelings created by the interaction “between the painting and the

contemplative eye” (Sublime 163, 173), describes the ekphrastic process from his

own experiences:

10

I have often had the feeling while going through the rooms of a museum

that the paintings were awaiting the visit of a gaze that might be mine…

The paintings, hanging from the picture rail, have no other being, no

other purpose, no other reason except to show themselves. They exhaust

reality in this ceremonial display… Let an eye suddenly alight on the

painted surface: then to the painting is offered the grace of a return to its

place of origin, and the sweetness of a return to peace in a site of which it

retained the secret memory… A painting implies a contact, one might say

„I show only myself, I offer only myself, I am an offering of colours and

forms only if you see me, only if in a prolonged gaze you give me back

what I give you to see…[by] invocation, convocation, provocation‟”

(Sublime 171-2).

Marin calls this meta-artistic phenomenon taking place between the art object and its

viewer “Je Ne Sais Quoi” – a “remarkable representation of the mechanism of a

work of art” (Sublime 209-18)13

. A similar term explaining this aesthetic exchange is

introduced by the beat artist William Burroughs. “The third mind,” which could be

explained by a new aesthetic experience that is brought about by looking at a

painting either by the poet or by the viewer, refers to “a state to see something new”

(qtd. in Foster and Prevallet xv)14

. Both Marin‟s and Burroughs‟s points to consider

the aesthetic qualities of works of art and ekphrastic poetry springing from those

works of art are important while dealing with ekphrasis. It is, therefore, safer to

extend Heffernan‟s compressed and ample definition by stating that ekphrasis (at

13 “Je Ne Sais Quoi” (“I do not know what” [translation mine]). Marin owes his term to the French painter La

Rochefoucauld, who had never used but implied it in the 1670s. Marin argues for the connection of the term to

Montaigne‟s “Que sais-je?” (“What do I know?” [translation mine]), another almost unidentifiable term, like

Marin‟s favourite concepts sublime and phantasia. He states that it is possible to apply “Je Ne Sais Quoi,” along

with sublime, to all styles, discourses, and genres although it is applicable best in painting. Marin puts emphasis

on the singularity of the observing “I,” with a pun on the word (“eye”), while the observer uses his virtual

knowledge or schema (with another pun on the Greek skhēma, meaning “figure” and “knowledge”) as he

examines the art object (Sublime 209-18). Another popular pun used in ekphrasis (in Marin and elsewhere) is

made on the word Greek “icon” (The root ichnos literally means “print” and at the same time “object”). 14 “The third mind” is actually the title of one of William Burrough‟s books, in which he deals with “cut-ups,”

basically a sort of pastiche that involves putting seemingly irrelevant narratives together to form up a new one

(Foster and Prevallet xv-xvi).

11

least literary ekphrasis in its modern sense) is the artistic (or aesthetic) verbal

representation (re-creation, or re-expression) of visual works of art.

There is need to bring forward one final essential point apart from the definition of

ekphrasis. By now, it is known that the word ekphrasis derives from the verb

ekphrazein, which means to depict and relate in detail. The word has directly been

transferred in its Greek, un-Romanized form by the majority of researchers and, as it

has been explained above, ekphrasis (as a literary term) has been limited to the verbal

representation of visual representation with artistic value. Besides, the word

ekphrazein has also been adopted through its rhetorical, pictorial and depictive sense.

It is, however, interesting to note that the scholars studying ekphrasis have not

considered using ekphrazein in its original type of the word; that is as a verb.

Regarding the fact that many Greek-originated words and/or terminology have been

directly transferred into English lexicology without loosing their etymological value

such as allēgorō [n] (allegory [n], allegorical [adj]), analogia [n] (analogy [n],

analogical [adj]), basis [n] (basis [n], basic [adj], base (on) [v], basically [adv]), and

theōria [n] (theory [n], theorem [n], theorise [v], theoretical [adj]), a verb form of the

word ekphrasis would be quite beneficial. Indeed, the verb ekphrazein, for an

unknown reason, has only been adopted either as a noun (ekphrasis) or as an

adjective (ekphrastic), and not in its original usage as a verb. It is my firm belief that,

although it does not exist in the OED for the time being, it is possible, practical, and

commonsensical to use a Latinized verb as ekphrasize in order to emphasize the act

of representation, rather than to attach the words ekphrasis and ekphrastic to

Anglicanized verbs like “compose” or “write.” Therefore, throughout this study, the

12

newly invented verb ekphrasize is going to be used extensively to simply mean “to

represent in words” or “to write ekphrastic poetry (or any kind of text) by focusing

on a work of art.”15

15 Although it is possible to use the verb ekphrasize as an intransitive verb as in “I think Wordsworth ekphrasized

whenever he saw a painting” (meaning that Wordsworth was easily carried away by paintings and was eager to

write ekphrastic poetry whenever he saw a painting), the transitive form of the verb (preferably with the

combinatory preposition “on”) would also be rather useful in order to differentiate the object of the verb (a

painting, a statue, a building &c.) and to clarify the meaning and antecedents in a sentence with several pronouns

as in “Wordsworth ekphrasized on “The Peele Castle” and expressed his mourning for his lost brother in it.”

13

1. 2. A Brief History of the Ekphrastic Tradition

Sumi believes that ekphrasis, after a long period of time, has been made popular by

the writings of Leo Spitzer, whose “The „Ode to a Grecian Urn‟ or Content VS

Metagrammar” first published in 1955, restored ekphrasis in its place in scholarly

discussions (12). However, although Spitzer‟s essay has inspired a generation of

scholars to revisit the tradition, this re-visitation was only a linguistic one. In other

words, if his essay has influenced researchers, as it surely has, many of those

researchers were the followers of the structuralist wave of the 50s and 60s. In fact,

ekphrasis, both as a rhetorical device and as a literary concept, has been a subject of

literary criticism almost since it was first brought to life in a variety of texts and

forms. Even though, as Moffitt suggests, much of what we might call “ekphrastic”

have either somehow disappeared or been destroyed due to the anti-iconography

movements in the Middle Ages (41), the remaining sources and poems, as it has been

pointed above, is almost more than enough.

Ekphrasis, which “…has been with us for nearly three thousand years” (Heffernan

Museum 7), is a tradition that has come from Homer down to Ovid, from

Shakespeare down to Romantics and D.G. Rosetti, and from W.H. Auden down to

William Carlos Williams. At the beginning, however, ekphrasis was far from being a

purely literary convention. It is clear that the earliest function of ekphrasis, as

detailed commentary or description, was merely rhetorical and educational

(Karwoska 45; Becker 2; Piltz and Åström 50-51; Marsico and Capa 214). The first

discussions are found in Greek handbooks of rhetorical exercises called

progymnasmata. Only four of the progymnasmata have survived from the Hellenistic

14

period to the present: those of Aelius Theon‟s (first-century BC), Hermogenes‟s (of

Tarsus) (second-century BC), Aphthonius‟s (of Antioch) (fifth-century BC), and

Nikolaus‟s (of Myra) (fifth-century BC). Despite its popularity, ekphrasis is rarely

mentioned in these handbooks though they provide the first relatively full discussions

(Becker 24; Piltz and Åström 50; Marsico and Capa 215)16

. Progymnasmata present

ekphrasis as a preliminary rhetorical exercise. They were uninterrupted narratives

such as stories from mythology or history and were exercised to teach students how

to narrate events and to talk eloquently. Susan Karwoska also notes that ekphrasis

was probably used to keep memory fresh (45-46). It was widely used in courts by

counsellors for the defence to convince the juries about the innocence of their clients.

Verdonk, while explaining the ancient function of ekphrasis, recalls the account of a

counsellor who argues against the accused and delivers an inspiring speech about a

metaphorical wild lion that had been let free and then killed everybody in the town,

including those who let it free, and how the jury were impressed by the liveliness and

vividness of his recounting only to indict the accused on the crime committed

(“Painting” 232).

As a common feature of the Greek and Latin literature, ekphrasis is observed in

many sources in the form of detailed narrative about artistic works such as,

Euripides‟s Electra, Ion and Phoenissae, Apollonius‟s Argonautica, Theocritus‟s

Idylls, Moschus‟s Europa, Heroda‟s Mimes, Naevius‟s Bellum Punicum, Virgil‟s

Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, Ovid‟s Metamorphoses, Longus‟s Daphins and

Chloe, Achilles Tatius‟s Leucippe and Clitophon, and Claudian‟s Panegyrics and Du

16 George Kennedy, in his Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors, provides a good overview of the

progymnasmata (54-73). The unique reference book on the progymnasmata is, however, Leonardus Spengel‟s

Rhetores Graeci (Vol.2, 1854).

15

Raptu Prosepinae17

. Being the earliest literary examples of ekphrasis, most of them

were about goblets, urns, vases, chests, cloaks, weapons, armours, and architectural

ornaments (Marsico and Capa204). These writings were either semi-critical

appreciations of ekphrastic styles adopted by rhetoricians or lyric ekphrastic poems

(or plays). Among such a wide body of literature, however, there are two

indispensable works that have never lost their popularity and importance. One of

them is Ars Poetica, Horace‟s oft-quoted lengthy verse-essay, and the other is

Homer‟s The Iliad, often acknowledged as the ultimate model of ekphrasis. More

about Horace and Homer will be presented in the following chapters but, throughout

the course of concise history of the tradition, it is fundamental to keep in mind that

Horace‟s proverbial statement, ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”)18

, has

become the motto for ekphrastic practices while the account on the Shield of Achilles

in the Iliad has been regarded as the locus classicus of ekphrasis (Haberer 1). As the

earliest known ekphrastic example in western literature, the Shield of Achilles

produced by Hephaestus (The Iliad, Book XVIII), is “as old as writing” for

Heffernan (9), while The Iliad demonstrates the way(s) how ekphrasis could be

exercised in verse. Similarly, because there had not been an Ars Pictura or Ars

Theoretica, Horace‟s work, through analogies between poetry, drama, painting,

music, dance (or arts in general), sets the fashion of ekphrastic criticism both for

poets and painters, and could be traced in almost every piece of literary criticism

from the Middle Ages, through the enlightenment, to the present.

17 See Appendix II for more on Greek and Latin sources of ekphrasis. 18 Translation mine.

16

Since both Horace and Homer inspired the writings in the Middle Ages and early

Renaissance, it is not surprising to find out that the discussions on canonical

elements of rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio and the like) in the works of later

generations of poets, critics and art historians like Lucian, Philostratus, Callistratus,

Virgil, Vida, Daniello, Alberti, Robortello, Matthieu de Vendôme, Fracastoro,

Minturno, Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Diderot, Dante and Chaucer. Among these literary

figures, Matthieu de Vendôme (Ars Versificatoria, ca. 1175) and Geoffroi de Vinsauf

(Poetria Nova, ca. 1210) were particularly prominent as far as theoretical points

about ekphrasis are concerned. Both Matthieu de Vendôme and Geoffroi de Vinsauf

were influenced to a great extend by Cicero‟s De inventione and Rhetorica ad

Herennium and favoured the very detailed descriptions from head to foot that Cicero

had defended (and Philostratus and Callistratus extensively had practiced). Many of

these writings, though not very aesthetically, were interested in either comparing

plastic arts with poetry or using ekphrasis as a literary device for long descriptions or

narratives in allegorical and lyric poetry. The idea of narrative description was

maintained in painting, as well. The “mania for allegory” (in painting) and “mania

for description” (in poetry) (Lessing xv, 5) continued through the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries. In 1435, when Leon Battista Alberti published his influential

Della Pittura, in which he re-introduced the inventio and elocutio issues in painting

and poetry, ekphrasis became once more a central subject of literary criticism. This

was followed by three essential criticisms: Luigi Daniello‟s La Poetica (1536),

which strictly follows Horace‟s well-known antithesis, Ludovico Dolce‟s Dialogo

della Pittura, which argues for the idea that the elementary function of ekphrasis is to

make audience see and hear (Graham 469), and C.A. Dufresnoy‟s De Arte Graphica

17

(1667), the initial sentence of which is directly taken from Horace (“ut pictura poesis

erit”).

As the sources from the antiquity were translated into vernaculars, the handbooks

from ancient Greece and the Latin-oriented criticism of the Middle Ages became

popular during the Renaissance (Lessing, 5-6; Becker 4; Graham 469). The

preliminary rhetorical exercises of the progymnasmata, chiefly descriptio locorum

(detailed description of cities, places, monuments) and descriptio temporum (detailed

description of places in different times), as observed in the classical rhetorical

examples from Virgil, Ariosto, Ovid, and Philostratus, were adopted by many

writers. One point worth mentioning at this stage is that unlike the large body of

literary and aesthetic criticism on ekphrasis, little genuinely ekphrastic poetry

remains from the pre-Renaissance periods19

. However, during the Renaissance and

afterwards, an increasing number of ekphrastic poetry were composed and the idea of

“ut pictura poesis”, “[the] very fiery particle of Renaissance,” became dominant

(Witemeyer 33); in W.G. Howard‟s words, ekphrasis began to be considered as the

“witty antithesis” of the age (qtd. in Méndez-Ramirez 24). Culminated with the idea

of harmony and decorum, descriptive passages and verses gained importance.

Among the important ekphrastic poetry of the time one may count Shakespeare‟s

“Rape of Lucrece,” Castiglione‟s “Cleopatra,” Spenser‟s Faerie Qveene, Garcilaso

de la Vega‟s Eglogas, Guillaume de Lorris‟s Le Roman de la Rose, and some

descriptive narrations in other Renaissance lyric poetry (Graham 469-70).

19 Ovid‟s Metamorphoses, Dante‟s Divine Comedy, some parts of Chaucer‟s allegories [House of Fame and the

Canterbury Tales], a number of lyrics and idylls from Tasso‟s Gerusalemme Liberata, and some minor narrative

poetry from various Latin and Italian poets are among the exceptions to this claim.

18

The Renaissance, then, is the period when ekphrasis was seriously taken into

consideration in England. The interest in the subject, it is safe to claim, reached its

peak in 1695, when Dufresnoy‟s De Arte Graphica was translated into English by

John Dryden. At length, the idea that painting and poetry share natural ties was

introduced to English literary circles and the first appearance of the word “ekphrasis”

in English in 1715 is noted as “a plain declaration of interpretation of anything”

(Marsico and Capa 204). Although there are traces of detailed ekphrastic narratives

and depictions in Chaucer for example, the first definition of ekphrasis in England

recalls the older definition of ekphrasis. However the tradition quickly shifts in the

centuries to come and a great number of poetry and criticism is produced during the

Restoration, the Romantic Age, and the Augustan Age, more or less simultaneously

with the continental Europe. In the meantime, the growing interest in carmen

figuratum, figure (or pattern) poetry, or more commonly known as emblem (or

emblematic) poetry, in which the poem on the page mimics the typographical image

of the poet‟s subject, emerged as an important resource for ekphrastic poetry.

Affected by the discovery of Egyptian hieroglyphs and obelisks that have been

transported to Rome, the depictions of painters like Poussin and Lorrain, who

depicted scenes from poets and mythological stories, especially from Tasso, and the

works of Christoforo Buodelmonti (Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, 1419), Leone

Battista Alberti (Della Pictura), Francesco Colonna (Dream of Poliphilo, 1499),

Valeriano (Hieroglyphica), and especially of Andrea Alciati (Emblematum Liber,

1531) and of Francis Quarles (Hieroglyphik of the Life of Man, 1638; Emblems,

1639), poets showed interest in the relationship between image and word in the form

of emblematic and ekphrastic poetry as observed in George Herbert‟s “Easter

19

Wings,” “The Altar,” “Sighs and Grones,” and “Heaven;” Robert Herrick‟s ““Upon

His Departure Hence;” Dryden‟s “A Song for St. Cecilia‟s Day, 1687” and

“Alexander‟s Feast;” and Shakespeare‟s “Rape of Lucrece” (Ormerod and Wortham

xxvii; Ulu “New Voices” 165; Brooks 85)20

. Commenting on the interest in “word-

paints” (Graham 417), Graham states that “The hugely popular emblem books –

over 3000 editions were issued from 1531 to 1700 – can be considered a genre that

demonstrates the view of poetry and painting as „sister-arts‟” (470).

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a drastic shift in the awareness of

ekphrasis. Abbé Jean Babtiste du Bos‟s Réflexions critiques sur la Poésie et la

Peinture (1719), Abbé Batteux‟s Les Beaux Arts Réduits à un Meme Principe (1746),

William Gilpin‟s Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel, and

On Sketching Landscape (1792), Uvedale Price‟s An Essay on the Picturesque, As

Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of Studying Pictures,

for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (1794), Richard Payne Knight‟s The

Lanscape (1794), and An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805)

brought about a new understanding to the relation between verbal and visual. The

developments in music and optics also resulted in a new formation of harmony,

perspective, and musicality in literature21

. Praz and Davidson think that, thanks to the

20 Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Bellini, Durer, Perriere, Corrozet, Montenary (predominantly religious

emblems), Masurice Scéne (Delie), Beza, Reusner, J.M.W. Turner, Hogart, and Whitney are among other

influential writers and painters as far as the emblem convention is concerned (Ormerod and Wortham xxvii; Ulu

“New Voices” 165-166). This tradition, which is also found in Greek (Simias of Rhodes, ca. 300 BC), Persian

and Chinese poetries (Graham 471), required that each object, place, book, person, or occasion should be

symbolized with a minimalistic and representative drawing, often accompanied with a Latin motto. The

phenomenon, as it will be explained in Chapter I, is one of the essential and rare instances where word and image

intermix. Other well-known examples of emblematic poetry are Mallarmé‟s “Un coup de Dés,” Dylan Thomas‟s

“Vision and Prayer,” John Hollander‟s “Types of Shape,” and some poems of Blake, G.B. Rosetti, War Poetry,

Pound, Joyce, e.e.cummings. 21 Walter Pater claims that all writing of the time was “toward the condition of music” (211). The innovations and

developments in music and optics (especially Newton‟s Opticks, 1704; inventions like Louis Bertrand Castel‟s

20

expansion of ekphrastic studies, “ut pictura poesis” had become “the golden rule…

of nineteenth-century narrative” (29). Correspondingly, unlike the mechanical word-

image relation in the Renaissance and the purely philosophical criticism in the

Middle Ages, ekphrasis had turned out to be an aesthetic problem requiring the

imaginative involvement of its audience (and creator) and promoted both accidental

and deliberate mixing of the arts (Witemeyer 34; Graham 472-476).

It is agreed, however, that the most prominent and powerful criticism of the age

belongs to Ephraim Gotthold Lessing. First published in 1766, Lessing‟s Laocoön:

An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry22

, which is going to be discussed at

length in the next chapter, drew the boundary between poetry and painting as it had

never been drawn (Hagstrum 9-10; Mitchell Picture 106; Fort 70; Burwick

“Ekphrasis” 98; Méndez-Ramirez 24-5; Lessing xxv). Edward Allen McCormick,

Lessing‟s translator, introduces Lessing as “…the first in modern times to define the

distinctiveness of the spheres of art and poetry and at the same time to penetrate

deeply into the nature of these two arts” (xxv). Lessing‟s commentary on the limits

of verbal and plastic arts soon became an authoritative text all over Europe. In

England, too, due to the fresh discussions Laocoön had initiated and the change in

the reception of ekphrasis, a number of works followed one another. David Hume‟s

On Taste (1757) and Edmund Burke‟s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of

Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) preceded Addison‟s and Ruskin‟s

“ocular clavecin,” an elaborate instrument for projecting colours by a keyboard; the definitions trying to identify

the identity of colours and tones; the idea that seven primary colours evoke seven primary notes &c.) are

projected in the symphonic and tone poems of Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz (Graham 474). Although

Witemeyer believes that it “…seems that music did not supplant painting as the dominant nineteenth-century

analogue to poetry among the sister arts” (33), the majority of the critics argue that music had already become a

part of the ekphrastic discussions. 22 Referred to as Laocoön henceforth.

21

writings in the imitative nature of painting and poetry and ekphrasis was once again

scrutinized within the idea of concrete Romantic imagination, natural imagery, and

Augustan decorum and expressiveness. By the end of the eighteenth-century,

…imagination was seen as an image making faculty, and language as the

prompter of images… [and] the natural analogy was between painting

and language; and [the new understanding of] language with its powers

of description, dominated poetry (Graham 473).

In the eighteenth-century, the opening of public museums, a point that will be dealt

with in detail in the following chapter, was also an important milestone for the

development of the interest in ekphrasis. The art works, now, became available to

everyone while they were protected and preserved in better conditions. Cataloguing

and preserving artworks in better conditions also made them more valuable. Scott

argues that, in 1806, at Cambridge and Oxford, two poetry competitions for “the best

poem on ancient works of art” had boomed the curiosity for plastic arts among

literary circles (“Shelley” 316). Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

thus, ekphrasis was a well-established and common literary activity. During the

course of its history in English literature, poetry had not come closer to painting as it

did in the nineteenth century. Under the influence of Blake, Keats, and Italian

painters, the members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, most of whom were

painters, tried to see the world with painter‟s eyes. The Victorian period, therefore,

produced ekphrasis with an awareness of the intimate relation between words and

images while their depictions were presented with more insight in paintings. Robert

Browning‟s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb,” “My Last Duchess,” “Andrea del

Sarto,” and “Fra lippo Lippi,” D.G. Rosetti‟s “A Venetian Pastoral,” “For an

22

Annunciation,” “For Spring by Sandro Boticelli (In the Academia of Florence),” and

“Lilith,” Lord de Tabley‟s “The Knight in the Wood,” and some of the ekphrastic

pieces from William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais are among the well-

known ekphrastic works of the period.

By the beginning of the twentieth-century, the tradition was widely known and

“commonly practiced” (Bruhn 14). Especially after “the most famous twentieth-

century illustration of ekphrasis,” W.H. Auden‟s “Museé des Beaux Arts” (Haberer

1), writing ekphrastic poems became rather popular. As the borders between arts

disappeared with Cubistic and Imagist discourses, more ekphrastic poetry was

written everyday (Szczepanek 5-6; Mitchell Iconology 25). Many noteworthy poets

of the century like William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Ashbery,

Robert Lowell, e.e.cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon,

Donald Hall, Derek Mahon, and Paul Durcan had offered poems out of this “very old

but very popular” genre (Francis 1). For Petrucci, coming across Paul Durcan in the

National Gallery or R.S. Thomas in the Louvre are probable incidents in a time of

cross-fertilization between visual and textual art especially in the second half of the

twentieth century (“Anaesthesia” 12). Indeed, as it is going to be presented in the

following chapters, going to museums to ekphrasize has become a common practice

among poets of our time. Then, ekphrastic poetry, which could be regarded as a

museum-centred poetry, has become a kind of artistic act inviting poets to meet

visual works of art for artistic re-creation. Today ekphrasis, with a number of

journals specially entitled “Ekphrasis” only in the United States and a number of

poetry societies devoted to the study of the relationship between the verbal and visual

23

mediums (Brown 41), is an extensively known and practiced literary phenomenon

that has found its place in many anthologies, journals, and volumes of poetry23

.

23 See Appendix III for more examples of ekphrastic poetry.

24

1. 3. “Stilvs Virvm Argvit:” Stylistics24

In 2005, PALA (Poetry and Language Association) asked its members to vote for the

most influential book of the last twenty-five years. The voting resulted in the triumph

of Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short‟s 1981 book Style in Fiction: A

Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. In the award ceremony, Short

noted that he was happy not only because of being honoured by such an important

award but also because the book has inspired a great deal of studies in Stylistics

(Baş). Although Style in Fiction is primarily about the stylistic analysis of prose, it

sets the basics of Stylistics, in general, in a confident and accurate way.

The very first sentence of Richard Bradford‟s book, Stylistics, is “Stylistics is an

elusive and slippery topic” (xi)25

. Indeed, for a long time, it has often been argued

that Stylistics was a sub-division of linguistic studies due to its ambiguous nature.

First, and probably the most common, issue considering Stylistics is that it has not

been agreed whether it is Stylistics, with a capital „S‟ and thus making it a distinctly

special currency within the history of literary criticism with its own methodology and

terminology, or it is stylistics, a critical device of analysis that has grown out of

Linguistics, Structuralism, Semiotics, discourse theory, Sociolinguistics, gender

studies, linguistic philosophy and a whole network of disciplines. Studying the

“relation between what happens in the text and what might happen outside it”

(Bradford 1), Stylistics has been considered only as a bridge between linguistics and

literature and a no-man‟s-land in the “the urban guerrilla warfare between linguists

24 Stilvs virvm argvit, Latin tag, meaning “style proclaims man” or as Leech and Short call it “the linguistic

„thumb-print‟” (12). Translation Leech and Short‟s (ibid. 12). 25 Quite similarly Talbot J. Taylor‟s book opens by claiming that Stylistics, which is “a theory of

communication,” is a rather complex topic (1).

25

and literary men” (Turner 144). The “warfare,” however was pointless, since the

twentieth century both manipulated and contributed to the interrelation and co-

organization between various fields of study. During the course of the previous

century, Barthes, Bakhtin, and Kristeva taught that anything could be regarded as

texts; Eco taught that social structures, culture, and arts could be understood through

semiology and language studies; Foucault and Althusser taught that meaning is a

social construct; Lacan presented how the human subject is constructed; and Derrida

taught the new philosophical standards (Wagner 2). Eventually, twentieth century

brought about theoretical, conceptual, cultural and philosophical changes and it is

due to this paradigm shift that the commonly accepted set-ups in arts, sciences, and

undoubtedly in literature experienced a changeover throughout. In the first half of the

twentieth century, Linguistics, as a science, expanded so much that, in the second

half of the century, linguists felt the need to co-work with sociology, philosophy,

history, archaeology, psychology, physics, biology, gender studies, and literature

(Bradford xii; Özünlü 19-22). As the borderlines of its sub-fields such as Semantics,

Morphology, Graphology, Phonology, Semiology, Lexicology, Syntax, Stylistics

(usually regarded as Discourse Theory, then), Sociolinguistics, and Grammar began

to enlarge, Linguistics, alone, turned out to be too general, too inclusive, or

insufficient on its own to answer the needs of the ever-expanding study area. It was

in the 1950s, that Stylistics, which has suffered from “bittiness” and the lack of a

concrete theory (along with Semiology) (Leech and Short 3), began to break free

from Linguistics as an independent field of study. Owing to its scientific grounds

(linguistic methods) and adequate resources (a great body of literary texts), Stylistics,

26

metaphorically speaking, declared its independence in the second half of the

twentieth-century.

Simply defined “as the linguistic study of style” (Leech and Short 13) or as “…an

approach to the analysis of (literary) texts using linguistic description… in as explicit

a way as possible” (Short 1-5)26

, Stylistics found its place in many of the college

curricula in the 1960s (Verdonk Twentieth Century xvii). Although Bradford traces

the roots of Stylistics in techne rhetorike of Greek rhetoricians such as Corax,Tisias,

Gorgias, and Isocrates (Bradford 3-4), it is more likely to look for the predecessors of

Stylistics in the twentieth-century Linguistics27

. Verdonk is convinced that Stylistics

has two main origins, both of which are essentially formalist and “…literature was

[something] to be looked upon as a self-contained enterprise” for both of them: one

is American New Criticism and the other is British Practical Criticism (Twentieth

Century xvii). What Verdonk means by American criticism is actually a modern

derivation of the culmination of Russian Formalism, Prague Linguistics, and

Saussurian Structuralism of the 1950s. With their origins in the early stages of

Formalism, the first group could be classified as the “structural determinists”

(Chandler 12), who are after the objective and scientifically irrefutable elements of

language. These critics, such as Jakobson, wanted to move away from finding out the

describing devices in a text to analysing their functions:

26 Original emphasis. 27 Unlike Bradford and Verdonk, Özünlü regards Charles Bally as the father of Stylistics and believes that its

roots should be sought in the Renaissance trivium (logic, rhetoric, and grammar) then in the linguists of the

Prague School and Russian formalism (16-22, 32-33). However, he also divides Stylistics into two and terms

them as “Prescriptive Stylistics” and “Structuralist Stylistics” (objectivist and affective) (ibid. 16-22). Talbot J.

Taylor, too, claims that Charles Bally is the founder of modern Stylistics (43). According to Taylor, Bally has

developed Saussure‟s theory and put emphasis on expressivity of language in order to understand “idees pures”

(ibid. 24). Nevertheless, Taylor believes that the schools of Stylstics are invariant because style itself is “…an

amalgam of psychological, sociological, literary and linguistics notions which are both common-sensial and

theoretical in their origins and uses” (42). Therefore, for Taylor, it is hard to divide Stylistics into schools.

27

The intend… was thus to make the study of literature more scientific, to

replace the biographical, psychological, philosophical, historical and

sociological meditations on literary texts with the appropriate object of a

literary inquiry: the laws of literature and their history (Buchbinder 84)28

.

Although each individual linguist has various views, explanations and stand-points of

their own, the general view was that language, either written or spoken, could (or

should) be analysed methodically and only by way of objective data and analysis

could one understand the structure and nature of language. Along with Greimas,

Jakobson, C.S. Pierce, Halliday, and Sinclair, Saussure is one of the leading figures

of the argument (Stubbs 23; Chandler 8-9; Turner 14)29

.

Stylistics and indubitably Linguistics owe some of their basic concepts to Saussure.

Saussure‟s dyadic model, consisting of signifié and significant, has made an essential

distinction between the abstract and the concrete, or between the code and the

message, which in turn has allowed linguists to study the functional differences in

language and communication (Chandler 24-27). Giving priority to speech, rather

than written language, Saussure has also put emphasis on the distinction between

28 A similar statement is found in Poirier. Commenting on Jakobson‟s poetic function, which “foregrounds the

language itself of the text… [by emphasizing] „the message for its own sake‟” (DeGeorge and DeGeorge 93),

Poirier states that criticism should encourage itself “not with rendered experience but with the experience of

rendering” (111). He further argues that criticism must always “...go back to acts of rendition, to language, which

is one reason why there are so many quotations in this book and so much verbal analysis of them (ibid. 111). 29 Other linguists or philosophers mentioned have developed equally important and influential arguments.

„Transformational grammar‟ and „functional model,‟ argued by Halliday (and then Sinclair), argue that linguistics

should co-work with social sciences; that authenticity is essential in literary language; that language is a linguistic

device which transmits culture; and that Saussurian dualisms should be reviewed and expanded. Halliday‟s model

is usually considered to be objective but mechanical (Leech and Short 5; Stubbs 23). Bally and Riffaterre has

argued that the most essential aspect (and function) of language is its expressivity and emotive state (Leech and

Short 18). Similar to the ideas of later semioticians and thinkers like Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Eco, Lévi-Strauss,

and Greimas, Pierce‟s model, a triangular semiotic model consisting of sense, sign vehicle, and referent on each

corner, focuses on the function of signs. Pierce, probably unknowingly, has written almost the same sentence with

Thomas Aquinas when he stated that “we think only in signs” (qtd. in Chandler 17) (See 5.3 in Chapter IV).

Prague linguists, however, were interested in poetic function and foregrounding (Leech and Short 28), while

Pierce defended the importance of linguistic and textual signification. Leech and Short summarize the other

formalist ideas by claiming that I.A. Richards was attracted by sense, feeling, tone, intention, Jakobson by the

referential, the emotive, the connotative, the phatic, the poetic, and the metalinguistic, and finally Halliday by the

ideational, the interpersonal, the textual and eventually the functional (30). Because Saussure‟s ideas represent

the linguistic trends of the time, only Saussure is going to be exemplified in the Introduction.

28

langue (referring to the set of general rules in a given language) and parole (referring

to the specific, regional, functional, and temporary occurrences in the same given

language). The latter duality between langue and parole has received much

appreciation and the study of parole, which indicates the particular stylistic instances

in a text, has been appointed to Stylistics (Leech and Short 11; Turner 14).

A similar idea is also found in Charles Bally‟s Traité de Stylistique Française.

According to Bally, the message, or signifié, is arbitrary because it is abstract.

Parallel to this, the language that expresses it, or signifiant, is also arbitrary because

it uses arbitrary signs. Bally concludes that the job of language studies should be to

discover the système expressif (or “verbal expression”) and the relationship between

signifying systems (qtd in Talbot J. Taylor 27)30

. Although Saussure‟s and Bally‟s

contributions seem to remain unmatched, Bally‟s tendency to study language

synchronically rather than diachronically along with his binaries that disregard

multiple relations between signifiers and signifieds and leave out social context have

caused Linguistics to become less Saussurian especially after the 1970s (Chandler

12-14).

The second group of linguists could be considered more comprehensive and non-

interventionist. Louis Hjelmslev, for instance, argues that content and expression (or

meaning and structure) are bound to each other, and one could not do without the

other (49). For Hjelmslev and his followers, context arises from situational discourse.

Besides overall meaning of a text, and whether a macrotext (langue) or a microtext

30 These ideas have been adopted and popularized by Roman Jakobson, who puts the emphasis on the “verbal

expressivity” (350), and today Bally‟s focus on expressivity is known as Jakobsonian model (Talbot J. Taylor

63).

29

(parole), is fundamental for the analysis of context and meaning (Hausenblas 127-

128, 131-135)31

. The idea that context and content should not be ignored while

studying the linguistic structure became one of the strongest arguments of

stylisticians because context is an important element in stylistic analysis and a key

component that determines the style in a text. In fact, it could be claimed that

considering content in a stylistic analysis is what differentiates Stylistics from pure

Linguistics. In Turner‟s words:

The study of the meaning and style will have to bring back what

grammar leaves out… The grammarian isolates the forms and

constructions to which meaning can be attached and establishes the

norms against which variation can be clearly marked (19).

The same conclusion is also made by Leech and Short when they agree that stylistic

analysis is dependent on the study of contextual (content) and textual (structure) at

the same time (19)32

. Later in his own study of Stylistics, Short proposes that a

sample stylistic analysis begins with a general interpretation of a text followed by the

examination of lexis, semantico-synthetic deviations, grammar, and phonetic patterns

and finalized with stylistic commentary and interpretation that combines context and

structure (Short 17-26).

31 Hausenblas states that context arises from situational and verbal discourses and likens his distinction to

Hjelmslev‟s (127-128). Similarly, Lecklie-Tarry designates iconicity (iconic or symbolic signs) and context

(situational or cultural) as the two sources (or levels) or contextual network of a text (77-78). 32 A similar point is also argued by Talbot J. Taylor. He observes that, especially in the twentieth century,

Stylistics has two important aspects; one is that Stylistics does not solely study “linguistic meaning” and the other

is that it deals with the textual and contextual unity the style of texts present (17). Besides he adds that the idea of

studying the unity of style has been dominant from Saussure‟s langue model to Bally‟s emphasis on expressivity,

from Jakobson to the modern bi-planar models of Bloomfield and Riffaterre (ibid. 16).

30

Michael Riffaterre could also be placed in the second group. While Saussure puts the

emphasis on difference between the message and speech, and Bally and Jakobson

focus on expressivity, Riffaterre deals with the function of communication (Talbot J.

Taylor 63). For him, as for Hjelmslev, “expressiveness” and the “content” of the

message are the same and cannot be separated as if they belonged to other factors

other than the speaker. Therefore, he defines Stylistics in the following words:

Stylistics… studies the act of communication not as merely producing a

verbal chain, but as bearing the imprint of the speaker‟s personality, and

as compelling the addressee‟s attention. In short, it studies the ways of

linguistic efficiency (expressiveness) in carrying a high load of

information (“The Stylistic” 316).

Riffaterre‟s emphasis on the unity of content and message comes from his insistence

on the psychological aspect (or “affectiveness”) of the speaker33

. He believes that it

is the speaker who composes and brings together the meaning and the style of a

message addressed to its receiver and this results in a multiplicity of “styles”

(Riffaterre “Criteria” 158; Talbot J. Taylor 67-68)34

. In other words, adding the

speaker‟s psychology to the already complicated message, the meaning could be

unpredictable. So, for him, only the style of a text, which includes the message, the

33 This idea is probably based on Locke‟s notion of words. Lock believes that “words, in their immediate

signification, are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them… [and they] are often secretly referred first to the

ideas supposed to be in other men‟s minds” (See Parts I, II, and IV in “Of Words” for details). However, Hornsby

and Longworth remind us that Locke does not think that all words stood for ideas for he made a distinction

between the words for idea and functional words (“particles” like connectors “and,” “but” and so on) (15). 34Riffaterre‟s idea that the psychology of the speaker should be regarded has been influential in the following two

decades (the 1970s and 1980s) (Talbot J. Taylor 67). Noam Chomsky, for instance, was influenced by

Riffaterre‟s idea while arguing for the consideration of human factor in linguistic studies. Correspondingly

George Dillion argued for the potentiality of multiple styles due to the same factor (ibid. 68, 99). However the

idea was severely criticised by behaviourists such as Ohmann, who believes that “a style is a way of writing –

that is what words mean” (ibid. 88).

31

signifying codes, and the imprint of its composer, could provide a considerable idea

of the message35

.

The idea of impending potential styles due to the human aspect soon became popular

among a number of critics. Fowler, for example, states that the core of style, written

or spoken, is based on “particularity, individuality, and concreteness” and condemns

strict structuralism for its persistence on general linguistic features (“The New” 11).

For him, a study of style “…makes the individual work more recognizable, more

discrete, its physiognomy more salient” (ibid. 11). Supporting Fowler, Freeman

claims that because poetic style can “bend the laws of ordinary language” with its

multiplicity, it requires an all-embracing study involving linguistics, psychology,

sociology and literature (21)36

. Nevertheless, it is in E.H. Gombrich that the

emphasis on human factor is most straightforward. Gombrich opens his momentous

book, The Story of Art, by stating that “There is really no such thing as Art. There are

only artists” (15)37

. Gombrich‟s emphasis on the individuality of artists, their styles

and creativity, and the individuality of their works has become an essential idea

adopted by stylisticians. Stylistics, then, regards each text as unique and original –

even if two texts from the same period or from the same author are analysed,

different stylistic results could be achieved. Because as “we interpret world

35 Riffaterre suggests that an elliptical decoding would be better for readers who want to understand a text

(“Criteria” 160-161). Containing prediction in its core, elliptical decoding has not received much appreciation

(Talbot J. Taylor 66). 36 As a structuralist, Jean Piaget, too, focuses on the idea of wholeness, as one of the three essential objects of

structuralism. The other two aims of structuralism acknowledged by Piaget are “the idea of transformation and

the idea of self-regulation” (5). 37 Gombrich, here, also laments for the current state of art “…for Art with a capital A has come to be something

of a bogey and a fetish” (The Story 15). Gombrich at this point also opposes his colleague Nelson Goodman, who

believes that there are no limits to painters‟s imagination. By stating “almost any picture may represent almost

anything,” Goodman suggests that artists are licensed to produce whatever and however they like (38). But

Gombrich believes that there are limits to imagination and creation such as artist‟s personality, temperament,

preferences, style, social background, abilities, habits, expectations, and tools (Art and Illusion 75).

32

differently… many different styles” come into being and it is possible to state that no

two styles could be the same (McKee 34-35). Therefore, style indicates an

idiosyncratic expressiveness, particularly and specially belonging to its bearer:

Style is an increment in writing… All writers, by the way they use the

language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities

and their biases. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable (Strunk and White

67).

Or as Hoey puts it:

The study of literary language by linguists has always promised two

types of insight. The first is insight into the individuality of a writer‟s

style – indeed the very name stylistics reflects that concern. The second is

as a tool for the interpretation of individual works (123).

It is the job of Stylistics, thus, to study this infinite web of styles (of each text, each

writer) and probably this is the reason why it needs to co-work with Linguistics,

Psychology, Sociology, Semiotics, Semantics, Philosophy, and many other fields.

Indisputably, as “the branch of language study which is principally concerned with

integration of language and literature,” Stylistics is mostly concerned with literary

texts (Carter and Simpson 2)38

. Besides, since poetry (or the poetic line) has a more

complex, open-to-manipulation, and “interesting” structure compared to that of prose

(Leech and Short 2; Bradford 15; Carter 68; Buchbinder 41), stylisticians are usually

inclined to analyse poetic texts rather than prose texts. Whether poetic or prosaic,

Stylistics asks three types of questions to the literary texts they analyse: What, Why,

38 Carter and Simpson, in order to keep their objective linguistic stance, add that “there is no such thing as a

„literary language.‟ That is to say, there are no items of modern English vocabulary or grammar that are

inherently and exclusively literary” (Original italics) (Simpson 7).

33

and How – What does the text mean? Why does the author (or the persona in the

text) prefer present structures? How does the text come to mean what it means?

(Leech and Short 13; Short 6)39

. This interrogative mode results in a thorough and

sometimes exhaustive examination but it “…enables us to identify and name the

distinguishing features of literary texts, and to specify the generic and structural

subdivisions of literature” (Bradford xi) and “…[provides] as much explicit evidence

as possible for and against particular interpretations of texts” (Short 27).

Apart from asking the crucial questions above, Stylistics has developed its own

terminology and technique in order to interpret and analyse literary texts in detail and

to “specify the principles by which sentences represent meaning” (Soames 46). Most

stylistic terms and methods derive from Linguistics40

. Stylistician studies the lexis,

syntax, tense, pronouns, modality, clause structures, sound, and meaning (Carter and

Nash 117-123), by examining foregrounding and backgrounding structures, parallel

structures, metrical patterns, repetition, deviation (linguistic, phonetic,

graphological)41

, figures of speech, and grammar42

. Among these terms, however,

Stylisticians primarily make use of parallelism, deviation and foregrounding the

most. Stylistician looks for literary “clues” such as parallel structures, repeated words

and sounds, and deviating structures to conclude about the overall and concealed

39 Comparable questions have been asked by Jakobson, who believes that poetry is itself a style: “What makes a

verbal message a work of art? …How does poeticity manifest itself?” (350; Talbot J.Taylor 44-45). Hornsby and

Longworth also argue that the study of style “must address questions about what speakers do with words as well

as questions about how words behave” (86). 40 It should also be recalled that, Linguistics, just as Stylistics, owes much of its terminology to the complex

Greek and Latin poetry and metrics (Clark 27). 41 The term “deviation” has been subdivided by Short as lexical, grammatical, semantic, graphological, and

phonetic (55). It is also important to note that deviation could be observed in different works from different

literary periods as well as from different regions (Short 55; Leech and Short 45, 74-75; Turner 165-169; Chapman

30). In order to consider the historical or regional differences of texts, a stylistician, just like a new historicist,

could even consult to “essays, memoirs, biographies, travel journals” of the time the text belongs to (Chapman

29). 42 See Appendix IV for more on stylistic terms.

34

meanings of texts. Deviation, which is a very close term to defamiliarization, seeks

the structures that make texts unique. Foregrounding, itself borrowed from painting,

is the common way of deviation writers use to bring forth certain points and ideas

and to make texts or the elements in a text original. Leech and Short claim that there

are two kinds of foregrounding: one of them is qualitative foregrounding that

foregrounds the object semantically; the other is quantitative foregrounding which

uses structural patterns such as capitalization, punctuation, or lineation (69-70). In

short, just as in painting, foregrounding deviates texts and offers linguistic

modifications and parallels for readers either by stress, punctuation, grammar or

articulation as in the castle in Wordsworth‟s “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture

of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir Georges Beaumont:”

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves,

Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,

The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.

(49-52)43

Among the harsh atmosphere and weather outside, the castle stands unaffected and

noticeably confident. The castle, capitalized as Castle (graphologically

foregrounded), presented as being “huge” (lexically foregrounded), and depicted as

“cased in the unfeeling armour” (semantically foregrounded) is easily perceptible.

Foregrounding, as in “Peele Castle,” therefore, aims to make the desired object

noticeable by way of linguistic description (Short 11). Another essential point to be

touched upon in stylistic analysis is the repetitive and parallel patterns. Indeed, Short

43 Referred to as “Peele Castle” henceforth. The poem will be referred to in Chapter III. See Illustration I.i. for a

reproduction of Sir George Beaumont‟s Piel Castle in a Storm.

35

regards parallelisms in a text as the key element of stylistic analysis by naming it the

relation between repeating patterns parallelism rule (14). The parallelism could be

phonological (as in the alliterating “s” [“Castle, standing here sublime” in the lines

above] or assonating “i” [“The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves”]),

lexical (as in the thrice repeated definite article [“The lightning, the fierce wind, the

trampling waves”], semantic (as in the harshness created by the “brave,” “unfeeling

armour,” “lightning,” “fierce wind”, “trampling waves”), metaphorical

(personification of the castle as an archaic warrior), or contextual (the castle standing

alone in its sublimity is presented as if it is caged in an ancient armor). The parallel

patterns, hence, provide the examiner (reader or viewer) with perspectives from

different angles while they also give an idea of the general structure and meaning of

the analyzed text.

One of the advantages of Stylistics is that it offers an all-encompassing analysis that

enables the reader see the larger picture, and for Short, this is the reason why it “…is

a part of the essential core of good criticism” (5). As a combination of structural,

contextual, and pragmatic analyses with many variants (Turner 11; Chandler 79;

Riffaterre 47; Leech and Short 70), it avoids superficial commentaries by covering

almost all aspects of linguistic analysis. Therefore, stylistic analysis is never singular

or occupies a solo point of view. Besides, it does not leave out the author of the text,

which has been regarded as one of “the first causalities of [the] attack” against the

concept of authorship in the 1960s (Wagner 4). Rather it looks for the “linguistic

choices of writers” to understand the Hows and Whys behind these choices (Short

69). In Chapman‟s words, such an analysis “…begins once we are inside writer‟s

36

imagined world and can try to assess how well he has performed his self-appointed

task of creation… [because] writer‟s imagination brings about his style” (26-28).

Stylistics, then, does not offer a style but analyzes existing styles. This is a crucial

point distinguishing Stylistics from entirely formalist methods. It regards its subjects

as original; that is, it studies each text in its own context within a holistic approach

since there is “no consistency in style” (Leech and Short 69)44

. Reminding us that

Stylistics deals with “…the formal, technical and informative styles as well as the

conventional and the confessional” (Turner 230), Turner argues that

A single sentence cannot finally be judged in isolation… Rules of style

are out of fashion but evaluation remains a prime objective of literary

stylistics. We avoid making general rules because we allow that writers

may have very various purposes and we are now prepared to assess the

style of a particular work in relation to the purpose of that work (234).

Unlike the linguistic tendency that singles out each sentence, line, or phrase and

analyzes them independently, Stylistics takes the general and particular into

consideration at the same and tries to conclude with a more comprehensive and

realistic overview and analysis of texts. In other words, the isolating perspective of

linguistics maintains in Stylistics only in that it examines each text individually with

all its aspects allowing one to find out more about the text, its meaning, and its

structure.

44 The italicized holistic is aimed to draw attention to the quality of Stylistics to disregard isolating particular

aspects or parts of texts for analysis. Since words and parts in isolation would not contribute to the totality and

constitution of texts, stylistic avoids or should avoid such exercises (Eco 75; Talbot J. Taylor 15).

37

Naturally there are some disadvantages of Stylistics. The most frequently mentioned

inconvenience of stylistic analysis is that, because it covers many aspects of a text, it

is impractical and lengthy. This criticism is not unacceptable or unjust since stylistic

analyses usually require long explanations and commentaries. For a single quatrain,

pages of analysis could be written down and the extensive explanations may vex

readers. Besides, the terminology it uses is not always familiar. Finally, stylisticians

are condemned for putting “manner” over “matter” and giving importance to

“expressiveness” rather than to “meaning” (Leech and Short 15; Turner 29).

Although Stylistics seems to focus on the structural elements of texts, it would be

unfair to claim that it disregards context and carries “the risk of decontextualisation”

(Susan Stewart 374)45

. As it has been pointed out in the previous paragraphs and by

Short himself, stylistic analysis begins with an overall commentary on the origin,

background, and context of literary texts and ends up in a stylistic interpretation that

brings together stylistic structures and the content of the text.

45 Susan Stewart argues that although it provides etymological insight, stylistic analysis may cause to move away

from context (374). Chandler adds that, due to its ties with Semiotics, Stylistics may become risky if it comes up

with non-scientific commentaries (208). As it is explained in the following parts, both criticisms are pointless

since Stylistics aims to go for the context through linguistic analysis. It is necessary to bear in mind that, at times,

stylistic analysis could seem too wordy and terminological. Moreover, as it is a new field of study, each

stylistician seems to come up with new terms and concepts of their own. Some of these newly introduced words

are really helpful, as seen on Short‟s coinage “neologism,” which refers to making up new words (Short 45). But

sometimes these new concepts overlap with already existing ones or make little sense. There is little point to

group alliterating consonants, for instance, as “full alliteration” and “loose alliteration” according to the number

their occurrences (Short 108-109) since, either it is full or loose, the critical point is whether there is alliteration in

a text or not.

38

1.4. Stylistics and Ekphrasis

The ekphrastic tradition, a brief introduction of which has been given above, has

been at the centre of many arguments on aesthetics, literature and art-history since

the ancients. Methods have been developed and discussions have been made about

the nature, function and value of ekphrasis but little theoretical and academic study –

detailed academic study in the sense that we understand today – have been conducted

concerning it. Not until the twentieth century can one meet a thorough theoretical

enquiry on the subject apart from that of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who in Tzvetan

Todorov‟s words, “explodes the framework of classical aesthetics” (Lessing vii).

Earlier works on ekphrasis, which shall be dealt with in the next chapter, do not go

beyond critical statements, observations, commentaries and preliminary remarks.

Many earlier critics of ekphrasis would solely regard the text, moving from the visual

to the verbal and then comment on the work(s) without a philosophical and/or

genuine perspective, and this tradition leaves readers only with superficial and text-

centred criticism. Of course, this does not mean that texts on ekphrasis before the

twentieth century have little or no value; rather they are as precious as the theoretical

works which themselves rely on such prior critics as Horace, Plutarch, Quintilian,

James Harris, and Joachim Wincklemann. However, the number of critical works

about ekphrasis experiences a rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

when a number of philosophical and theoretical ideas were put forward. With the

establishment of new curricula based on analysis, practice and close observation,

literature and arts received analytical and scientific criticism. Innovative methods of

studying literary and artistic works flourished and many theoretical and critical ideas

were developed within the last hundred-and-fifty years. Especially in the latter half

39

of the twentieth century, with the revitalizing of the image (ichnos) / verb (verba) /

speech (phonos) discussion, the study of the interrelation between images and words

was once more popular at least among some of the academic circles.

It is necessary to note that Stylistics and “ekphrasis” are seldom united and

articulated together. Indeed, throughout the research for this study, it has been found

out that only two articles have totally matched the key words “stylistic analysis” (or

“Stylistics”) and “ekphrasis:” Jennifer Bosveld‟s “Elastic Ekphrasis: Another Way

Toward Poetry” and Peter Verdonk‟s “Painting, Poetry, Parallelism: Ekphrasis,

Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics,” both of which are works of smaller scale and

scope. Therefore, the combination of ekphrastic poetry and stylistic analysis, as an

interdisciplinary and extracurricular study, could provide insight for more

comprehensive and resourceful studies in accordance with Barthes‟s notion of

“interdisciplinary,” who claims that

…in order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a subject

(a theme) and arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary

study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one (qtd. in

Braida and Pieri 10).

Although the interrelation between the verbal and visual have been the subject of

scholarly studies for a quite long time, ekphrasis and the newly established Stylistics,

which would provide a comparative outlook with its roots in Linguistics and

literature, could create the “new object” Barthes mentions. Commenting on the

mutual and intertextual relation between poetry and painting, Heffernan states that

there are two groups of critics who have taken the task of study the intermingling of

40

texts and visual arts. The first group of critics, for him, are the empirically minded

critics who simply compare and contrast poems and works of visual arts. The second

group, on the other hand, are the theoretically oriented critics who argue that it is

possible to read a work of literature spatially and decode paintings semiotically

(Heffernan Museum 1). He further suggests that merely comparing two works cannot

be efficient because such a simplistic point of view would leave out the critical

encounters between the text, as a work of literature, and painting, as a work of plastic

arts (ibid. 1). Therefore, while studying ekphrasis, it would be safer to rely on the

theoretical group, in which Stylistics is sufficient enough to take part.

As it has been pointed out earlier, stylistic analysis is best applied to poetry (Leech

and Short 2, Verdonk “Painting” 232). It is an established idea that a simply literal or

solely structural mode is never enough to interpret poetry, which usually involves

“complex grammar… highly organized, complex and unified re-creation of an

experience” (A.J.M. Smith xxxvii). There are 616.000 entries in the twenty-volume

Oxford English Dictionary (Lennard 103) and poetry, with its structural, lexical,

contextual richness and inimitable diction, has a special way of selecting and

arranging these words. Deriving from Linguistics, thus, Stylistics would be a

productive means to analyze the composite lexical and semantic structure of poetry

and to observe linguistic deviations within a poem.

Secondly, Stylistics is also a suitable analytical way to examine paintings, which

could also be “read” and studied through structural and contextual observation

because as in poetry, in painting, too, there are figures, backgrounding and

41

foregrounding elements, narratives presented in a special way of expression and

painterly style. Louis Marin, French art-historian and philosopher, opens his book

Sublime Poussin, with a crucial question that concerns the main arguments that will

be discussed in this study:

We read letters, poems, books. What does it mean to read drawings,

pictures, frescoes? After all, the term „reading‟ is immediately applicable

to books; can we say the same for pictures? How valid or legitimate is it

to extend the term‟s meaning and speak of reading in connection with

pictures? (5).

Regarding every object of art as text, Marin‟s questions are to be answered

affirmatively. If any text is open to „reading,‟ speculation and analysis, paintings can

also be read to in order to observe the syntax of a picture or the inscriptions and

traces of a painter‟s brush. This makes reading a seeking; a process of analysis and

thus, reading can be a way “to decipher, to interpret” a picture (Marin Sublime 7).

Furthermore, if a painting (or any visual image) is a text with a discourse and

language of its own (Schapiro 9), then it is possible to translate it into other

languages, discourses or texts. This idea, to be sure, forms the basis for ekphrasis, a

trans-textual phenomenon itself that “can unlock the mysteries of the painting

(Bosveld). Referring to this trans-textuality, the “…strong bond between poetry and

visual arts” and their imitative nature (“Painting” 234), Verdonk states that a

synchronized stylistic examination of poetry and painting would provide us both with

the knowledge of the poetic line and with

…mentally stored real-world experience, memories and images, genre

knowledge, the human delight in repetitive formal patterns, the embodied

42

experience of movements, spatial perception, figure-ground alignments

in visual and other sensory perceptions etc. (ibid. 231).

As products of highly stylized craftsmanship, both poetry and painting, thus, require

a comparative, scientifically objective, intertextual, multi-layered, comprehensive

study and Stylistics is able to provide such an outlook for both media. Moreover,

ekphrastic poetry, which combines the verbal and the visual, would be a good subject

for such a detailed way of analysis that combines linguistics and literature. In other

words, Stylistics and ekphrasis, as two two-sided and mutual constituents of

language, seem to match perfectly as matter(s) and manner(s) for evaluation.

43

1.5. Thesis

Lessing opens Laocoön with an analogy concerning art criticism, which could be

easily applied to modern studies:

The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine

feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him…

A second observer, in attempting to get at the nature of this pleasure,

discovered that both proceed from the same source… A third, who

examined the value and distribution of these general rules, observed that

some of them are more predominant in painting, others in poetry… The

first was the amateur, the second was the philosopher, and the third the

critic. The first two could not easily misuse their feelings or their

conclusions. With the critic, however, the case was different. The

principal value of his observations depends on their correct application to

the individual case (3).

This study, which aims to track ekphrasis from its early beginnings to the present in

order to study the general characteristics of the ekphrastic tradition in English, will

follow the steps of the critic Lessing describes above. Intending to find out and

explain the textual, structural, stylistic, and contextual relationships between painting

and poetry, the study aims to determine the “value and distribution of these general

rules” that Lessing mentions and to discover the literary and aesthetic connections

between the verbal and the visual by way of stylistic analysis.

Considering the difficulties of expanding the scope of the study to non-English

ekphrastic poetry, which will have to include the excessive number of ekphrastic

poems especially in German, Spanish, Latin and Italian, only ekphrastic poetry in

English will be covered with the exception of the early Greek examples which have

been translated into English. Besides, as the modern definition of the word ekphrasis

implies, mainly the ekphrastic poems on paintings, rather than ekphrastic poems on

44

sculptures, statues, buildings, photographs, and exteriors, are going to be studied in

order to limit the scope of the study. The only exceptions are going to be Keats‟s urn

in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Browning‟s “My Last Duchess” and the early ekphrastic

passages in epics and narrative poems such as the Iliad and Shakespeare‟s “Rape of

Lucrece,” which are about imaginary cups, paintings, armours, shields, tapestry, and

stone works.

The method of analysis is stylistic analysis. Especially stylistic terminology such as

deviation, foregrounding, repetition and parallelism are going to be referred to so as

to discover similarities and differences between paintings and poems. In that sense,

the analyses will be parallel to the critical views of the major Stylisticians and

theoreticians like Short, Leech, and Verdonk, who believe that the basic concern of

stylistic analysis is to find out the foregrounded textual parallelisms and repetitions

that could be reached through questions: what, how, and why (Short 17-26; Leech

and Short 13; Talbot J. Taylor 17)46

. About the analyses that will primarily focus on

the key concepts of Stylistics such as lexical and syntactical foregrounding,

repetition, deviation and parallelism, another significant point should be mentioned.

Stylistic method and terminology are not going to be used solely on verbal grounds;

because Stylistics provides advantageous structural outlook, stylistic analysis will be

used to correlate the poem (text) and the painting (image). In other words, since

stylistic analysis could be a revealing way to find out about the structure of visual

medium, it will be used to compare and contrast the styles of poets and painters as

well. As texts that could also be read, paintings will be taken into consideration from

46

See section 1.3. for details.

45

a stylistic perspective and studied on verbal level, within the limits of their paragonal

counterparts. In this way, Stylistics will work in two ways: firstly as conventional

stylistic textual analysis and secondly as a visuo-verbal method to consider paintings

and poems at the same time and on the same grounds.

Since the majority of the ekphrastic poems that are going to be analysed are based on

existing paintings, the analysis is going to focus on the structural relations between

the poem and its source such as the correspondence of the paintings axes (light,

shadow, layout of characters and the like) and the poem‟s structural elements

(metrical structure, rhyme scheme, line structure and so on). As it has been explained

earlier, since stylistic analysis requires a considerable amount of space, not all of the

stylistic aspects are going to be applied; instead, the study will focus on the

appropriate ways of stylistic analysis that are relevant to the poems at hand. Since

essential stylistic points such as speech acts and narrative modes are more apposite to

prose works, these aspects have been excluded from the analysis. So, following

Short‟s suggestions on stylistic analysis, each analysis is going to initiate a

contextual and textual overview of the work(s) followed by the suggestions of the

most suitable ways and terminology of stylistic analysis that could be applied to that

particular poem and painting. Moreover, due to the same reason, it is impractical to

analyse the totality of a poem; for instance, it would take hundreds of pages to apply

a stylistic analysis to Book XVIII of the Iliad in order to analyse the Shield of

Achilles within ekphrastic tradition and stylistic codes. Instead, the most

representative sections of each poem (excluding shorter poems such as “Museé des

Beaux Arts”) are going to be studied in depth for this might provide an overall and

46

accurate idea about the ekphrasticality of the examples. In addition to that, ekphrastic

characteristics of sample poems (like paragonal relationship, gazer-gazed

correlations and so on) will be evaluated with reference to stylistic findings.

Apart from this introductory chapter, there are going to be four chapters followed by

a closing section. Chapter I is going to deal with the theoretical background of

ekphrastic problems. It will deliver the mimetic, ontological, structural, and modern

arguments of ekphrasis some of which will be criticised or defended, and then

present alternative explanations, categorizations, and descriptions that will be

referred to while analysing ekphrastic examples in stylistic manner. Chapter II will

begin with the earliest examples of ekphrasis like Homer‟s The Iliad, Virgil‟s

Aeneid, and Ovid‟s Metamorphoses, and then move on with early examples of

ekphrasis in English such as Chaucer‟s Canterbury Tales. As the study is carried on

chronologically and because there are not any prominent ekphrastic pieces written in

the Middle Ages, the chapter will end with Renaissance examples of ekphrasis from

Shakespeare, Herrick, and Marvell, with particular emphasis on (and analyses of)

Ben Jonson and Richard Lovelace. Chapter III will begin where Chapter II has left

and examine the ekphrastic tradition until the twentieth century. However, the main

concern of the chapter will be Romantic ekphrasis, which will deal with Blake,

Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley respectively along with ekphrasis in the Victorian

Age with emphasis on the “painter-author[s],” in Marin‟s words (Sublime 9), of the

Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, especially D.G. Rosetti. The analysis on Rosetti will be

accompanied by another analysis on another representative Victorian poet, Robert

Browning. Chapter IV will study the modern examples of ekphrastic poetry from the

47

early twentieth-century to the present. Poets like W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, Derek

Mahon, and William Carlos Williams will be referred to in this chapter. Each of

these chapters will contain an introduction on the period as well as a conclusion part

that summarises the characteristics of the ekphrastic phase in order to help readers

correlate the chapter with previous and following chapters. Besides, each section is

given a title number such as “3.3” or “2.5” to make the text easier to follow and to

make in-text-references less complicated. Finally Conclusion chapter will use the

results of analyses that have been made throughout the chapters and present the

analytical conclusions considering as to how poetry represents works of visual arts

and how two works of art interrelate by referring to the studied ekphrastic poems. In

other words, Conclusion chapter will match the stylistic findings with the general

characteristics of ekphrastic tradition from the ancients to the present.

As a study which explores the relationship between the verbal and the visual, there is

need to refer to images. Therefore, an Illustrations section will present the paintings

with a list of illustrations that are going to be referred to. Beginning from Chapter II,

each illustration will be provided with a Roman numeral so as to avoid confusions in

finding the related illustration47

. Apart from that, an Appendices section is also

provided to save the body of the study from wordiness and over-explanations, to

clarify the considerably relevant points that are not given in the chapters and to

present the full-text versions of the poems that will be analysed when necessary.

47 The illustrations actually begin in Chapter II but the only exception is Sir George Beaumount‟s paintings that

will also be referred in Chapter III. Therefore, this particular paiting is labelled as “I.i.” The capital Roman

numerals refer to the chapters while the lower case numerals refer to the illustrations in order of appaerence and

reference. As the illustrations begin in Chapter II, “I.iv,” for instance, refers to the fourth illustration in Chapter

II, while “III.x,” as another example, refers to the tenth illustration in Chapter IV.

CHAPTER I

“Ut Pictura Poesis”

…pictoribus atque poetis

Quiblibet audendi simper fuit aequa potestas

…

Ut pictura poesis; erit quae, si propius stes,

Te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes1.

Following the preliminary introduction to the ekphrastic tradition and presentation of

basic terminology and definitions, this chapter aims to cover the discussions

considering the nature of ekphrasis along with some of the fundamental

philosophical and theoretical problems that have been put forward about ekphrasis as

a literary phenomenon. In addition to the primary ideas and discussions, the chapter

also aims to initiate a new perspective and offers a new holistic approach to the issue

by combining ekphrastic tradition and stylistic analysis. These theoretical

suggestions are intended to play crucial role in the development of the dissertation

and will be referred to in the subsequent chapters.

1 From Ovid‟s Ars Poetica (8-9, 361-362). Emphasis added. Translation Becker‟s: “…poets and painters have

always had / An equal licence to venture anything at all… / Poetry is like painting: one works seizes your fancy /

If you stand close to it, another if you stand at a distance” (30).

49

2.1. “Ut Pictura Poesis:” The Nature of Ekphrasis

Horace‟s maxim “ut pictura poesis,” “as is painting, so is poetry,” has been the key

word for ekphrastic exercises from the antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and to the

Renaissance. It is agreed that both the aesthetic and imitative discussions on the

nature of ekphrasis that have been revolving around the limits of each medium,

painting (natural signs) and poetry (arbitrary signs and symbols), and the question

how these media communicate with one another have been singled down to Horace‟s

prophetic statement (Graham 466). “Ut pictura poesis” is both a motto and an

explanation; it formulates the relationship between the verbal and visual and explains

that this relation is based on imitative resemblance. Indeed, the basic quality of

ekphrastic exercise is that it is dependent on mimesis, by way of which the verbal

expresses itself and its source of inspiration. Moving on from this point onwards, it is

necessary to mention the general characteristics of ekphrasis as a literary device.

Becker summarizes the fundamental features of the term as follows:

Ekphrasis encourages us to think of representation as a function of these

two complementary processes [viewer-describer relations]… ekphrasis

invites us to consider responses to visual representation, then also, by

analogy, to consider our response to literary representation… Ekphrasis

has been read as a metaphor of poetry… [because] in an ekphrasis, the

response of a describer to a work of visual art can thus become a

metaphor for the response of an audience to the description itself, and to

other texts as well (37-8).

Becker focuses on three basic points and is content that each of these characteristics

is equally essential: ekphrasis requires a mutual relationship; it evokes an aesthetic

response; and it is principally a metaphor. Becker‟s concerns about the nature of

50

ekphrasis provide an outline for those who wish to explore the tradition; thus it is

crucial to examine these qualities in detail.

Mutuality and intertextuality are at the heart of ekphrasis. Because it is in the nature

of ekphrastic activity that two works of art, visual and verbal, interact resulting in a

transtextual product. The imaginations of a painter and a poet intermingle and co-

work although they do not do this simultaneously; more than that, the poem could be

composed centuries after a painting. Although there are seemingly two sides in this

transtextual encounter, the relationship between the two is an outcome of rather

complex web of interactions and intermingling imaginations.

Figure I.The first level of the linear ekphrastic relationship.

On the surface, ekphrasis occurs as in Figure I; a poet, inspired by a painter‟s

painting, composes a poem or simply a painting evokes the composition of a poem.

A closer inspection, however, shows that ekphrastic incident is more than it seems to

be.

Painting

Poem

Painter Poet

51

Figure II. The complex web of correlations that takes place underneath the seemingly simple

relationship between the ekphrastic media.

As presented in Figure II2, when the relations between the object d’art, painting, and

poem along with the relations between painter, poet, and readers are added to the

2 There is a similar schema in Moran in which artist, artwork, and reader are given in an interactive relation, the

result of which is indicated by the involvement of the whole society in this interaction (10). However, this

relationship would not be sufficient while considering ekphrastic relations. Besides, there are certain

shortcomings if the society as a whole is added up to the artistic experience between the artist, artwork and its

audience. It is also important to remember T.S.Eliot‟s idea on the three voices in poetry. According to him, the

COMPOSITION

Object (object

d’art) (A

person,

landscape,

etc.

Painting Poem Reception of

the poem

COMPOSER Painter

Poet Reader

C

D

A

B

52

discussion, the ekphrastic phenomenon becomes more intricate and less linear. The

object of painting filtered by the painter, the painting filtered by the poet, and the

poem read by the reader are complex even if they are in a linear relationship (as seen

in the relationship indicated by the letter A in Figure II). Besides, the relation

between the poet and the painting as well as the relation between the reader and the

poem, the painting and the object of painting bring to mind the questions concerning

mimesis, representation, and signification. It is also possible to consider the problem

from the aspect of compositions as well (as in the relationship indicated by the letters

B and C, respectively, in Figure II); the relation between the object of the painting,

the painting itself, the poem and the reception of the poem (sometimes the painting,

too) by the reader also bring about questions concerning aesthetics, style, and

creation (as in the relationship indicated by the letter D in Figure II).

These interconnections, which have been examined especially by modern

theoreticians and critics who study mimetic problems of ekphrasis, will be dealt with

in the following sections. But it should be kept in mind that ekphrasis involves a

multi-layered network of interrelations between the visual and verbal, which Rosand

calls a mutatis mutandis3 relationship, and it is in this sense of muto (“change”) that

it lies at the heart of ekphrasis (65). Talking about the interactive quality of

ekphrasis, Becker also states that

first voive belongs to the poet talking to himself or to no one; the second to the poet addressing an audience; and

the third to poet as persona (“The Three” 89). 3 Mutatis mutandis, originally a law term, literally means “with necessary changes.” Rosand uses it to mean that a

poet observes a painting and then writes his poem by making necessary changes – by transforming the visual

image into a different system of signs (65-66).

53

By describing the referent of visual images, the ekphrasis accepts the

illusion suggested by a work of art. By describing the surface appearance

and the materials of the images, it asks us to imagine that we see the

visual representation. But, by repeatedly calling attention to the act of

describing and the language of decription, the ekphrasis reminds us that it

represents a human experience, a translation of visible phenomena into

language (38-9)4.

The connection based on such an iconic relationship between the visual images and

what they represent and between the images and what the texts representing these

images thus play a fundamental role in ekphrastic creation. As Haines puts it,

although there is the risk of dominance problems, arts have a tendency to influence

each other and the ultimate example of this interrelation is ekphrasis in which two

arts try to co-exist in a single work (Haines 40).

Following Becker‟s formulation, the second fundamental feature of ekphrasis is

response because ekphrasis is itself a response. The important idea to mention at this

point is about the quality of the ekphrastic response. The reception of a work of

visual art by the poet is not a casual one; rather his response would be an aesthetic

and artistic one. Plainly put another way, the poet does not look at a painting and

pass on to another one as a casual museum visitor “who sees artworks for less than a

minute,” but he composes poetry by way of which he answers back to what the

painting has evoked in him (Marsico and Capa 206). Considering the relations in

Figure II, the response of the reader is also worth mentioning. Apart from the

response upon reading an ekphrastic poem, the reader also responds to the painting;

in this case, he becomes a reader-viewer or reader-gazer, rather than an undemanding

4 Emphasis added.

54

poetry audience. Because ekphrastic texts act like talking texts or communicating

texts, leaving a different impression on each reader about the visual work of art they

relate and this could be regarded as one of the fundamental elements of the core of

ekphrasis. Paul Ricoeur argues that the involvement of the audience in ekphrastic

relations occurs in two stages, divestiture and appropriation (Ricoeur 182-193).

Divestiture alludes to the acceptance of illusion and to the enchantment of the visual

while appropriation is meant to suggest the attention given to the working illusion

and the self-consciousness of the works of art5.

The movement between these two perspectives [divestiture and

appropriation] reflects the movement in an ekphrasis. Visual appearance

is respectfully represented, but also transformed by language into a

human experience, a reaction to what is seen (Becker 39-40).

Whether these gestures are called divestiture or appropriation, the relationship

between the reader-viewer and the poem and the interaction between the painting and

the poet indicate a response and it is essential to keep in mind that these responses

are not merely rhetorical but rather aesthetic. Because, as Blackhawk suggests, the

consideration of an ekphrastic piece is “like looking into the act of creation” (qtd. in

Foster and Prevallet xv); it is to consider the visual and the verbal at the same time to

give an aesthetic response and sensory experience or an “artistic communication”

(Davies 125).

5 Ricoeur also regards divestiture as an element of literature that is used as a context of reception while he treats

appropriation as an escape or diversion, a context of creation, and as an experience of foreignness and difference

(193-194).

55

The third characteristic to cover is the metaphorical quality of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis

is often regarded as a readable metaphor that requires a keen and educated eye both

for the poet and the reader (Baxandall 151; Becker 51):

An old picture is a record of visual activity. One has to learn to read it,

just as one has to learn to read a text from a different culture, even when

one knows, in a limited case, the language: both language and pictorial

representation are conventional activities (Baxandall 152).

It is a metaphor for the poet because the painting acts as a source of inspiration and

replaces other means of stimulation as well as the painter and the painterly

imagination. It is a metaphor for the reader because an ekphrastic poem substitutes

the painting by giving voice to the mute painting in its absence. This is the reason

why philosophers like Ralph Wollheim and Kendall L. Walton describe ekphrasis as

not seeing as but as seeing in; so what the ekphrastic audience faces in a poem (and a

painting) is not what it presents but what it represents (Davies 170-171).

Since arts, in general, have a tendency to singularize and express themselves

(Gombrich Art 117), ekphrasis tries to translate the visual into verbal by acting as a

metaphor or a substitute of the original work of art. Focusing on ekphrasis as a

“pictorial mimesis” and as a device of translation and transtextualization, Marin

states that “ekphrasis, the painter-writer‟s „experimental‟ mechanism, aims to show

the picture in the text, the picture as text, and to formulate the theoretical

propositions on which the painter bases his painting” (Sublime 127). Furthermore,

Marin believes that the metaphorical translation of the image is a magical

56

phenomenon through which the poet risks singularizing, the work of art as found in

the enthusiastic opening of his To Destroy a Painting,

…[Ekphrastic poetry] transforms painting into discourse, diverts images

into language. What we are dealing with here is a kind of magic or

rhetoric that constantly runs the risk of turning what can be seen by all

into purely private language (To Destroy 1).

While ekphrasis is an appealing metaphorical and magical entity for Marin, which

can also be observed in the double entendre of the root of the word (graphein,

meaning “to write” and also “to paint”)6, it is a more literary metaphor that depends

on the one-to-one correspondence of the works of art by Becker:

…the attitude that concerns me here is that of the verbal representation,

the ekphrasis, vis-à-vis the (imagined) visual representation. …the

provocation provided by the visual images; it is a performance or

experience of what is seen (2).

Critics like Becker, who argue for a kind of photographic and realistic ekphrasis

claim that the target source of ekphrastic relation should be transferred or even

copied in a relaxed and straightforward way to express the contents of the source as

faithfully as possible, thus turning ekphrasis the metaphor almost to ekphrasis the

simile (Goff 51; Becker 2-3). A similar and more enthusiastic remark comes from

Graham when he says that ekphrasis acts or should act as an epic simile rather than a

metaphor because much of ekphrasis springs from majestic subjects of history, epics,

6 Similar double entendres are found in image-oriented and grapho-phonological languages such as Chinese and

Japanese as seen in the Chinese “hsieh” and Japanese “kakimasu” both meaning “to write” and “to paint.” An

analogous pun is also made by Hollander on the verb “draw” when he invites his readers to “draw” the page to

observe “the drawings” on which the ekphrastic poems in his book are based (94).

57

and romances (465-466)7. These attitudes, the attitudes to regard ekphrasis either as a

complex allegorical figure or as a plain metaphor, no matter how ardent they may

sound, point to the representational nature of ekphrasis and, one way or another, it is

clear that it is in the nature of ekphrasis to rely on or even copy its source in a variety

of ways.

Related to “ekphrasis as metaphor” one last point about ekphrasis to which especially

the ancients gave importance should be mentioned: the quality of enargeia

(vividness) or saphêneia (clarity). In fact, the most conspicuous attribute of

ekphrastic activity was considered to be vividness until modern theories on ekphrasis

drew attention to different aspects of the term (Graham 465; Becker 35; Hollander

10). Aelius Theon, while talking about the progymnasmatic rhetorical exercises8,

defines ekphrasis as: “descriptive language bringing that which is being manifest

vividly before the sight” (Spengel 118)9. Therefore, the utmost aim of ekphrasis is to

make language a window, through which the audience is to view the described

phenomena according to this idea. Besides, Theon and his contemporaries believed

that the aim was to avoid distraction while trying to achieve this clarity. For that

reason, as Aphthonius argued, the job of ekphrasis should only be “to imitate

completely the things being described” and nothing more (Spengel 47)10

. In this way,

7 It is clear today that ekphrasis does not only occur in classical sources therefore it is possible to claim that

Graham‟s assumption presented about the metaphorical quality of ekphrasis can hardly be applied to modern

ekphrasis. 8 The ten rhetorical exercises Theon mentions are fable, anecdote, commonplace, praise and invective,

comparison, speech of a mythological or historical character, ekphrasis, argument and law (Spengel 72-130). 9 Parallel definitions are also found in the other three progymnasmata. Hermogenes of Tarsus claims that

ekphrasis has something to do with the“descriptive language, as they say, vivid and bringing that being made

manifest before the sight” (Spengel 118); Aphtonius of Antioch and Nikolaus of Myra surprisingly use exactly

the same words and state that it is the job of ekphrasis to bring “…the thing being made manifest vividly before

the sight” (Spengel 46; 491). 10 In order to avoid distraction, the progymnasmatic exercise suggests the writer occupy “a relaxed style” by

which the ancients meant organic unity. Nikolaus claimed that “to the proposed subject one should… fit the form

58

the rhetorical exercises suggested that the readers (or listeners) of a literary

description should be turned into viewers, rather than passive readers (or listeners)

and the reader-viewer is invited to involve in the process of description by filtering

and adding up their own experiences to the already described events or objects in

their mind‟s eyes:

The describer encourages the audience to accept the illusion and, in so

doing, diminishes attention to the medium (language) and the mediator‟s

experience… [Therefore] ekphrasis is to induce the audience to imagine

that they are actually seeing the phenomenon being described… [The]

reaction of the viewer, the describer‟s experience or interpretation of

phenomena, is to be part of the description after all. Any description is

necessarily an interpretation; a describer selects and organizes an

infinite variety of aspects of phenomena… Ekphrasis here is not to

describe just the visible appearance of the work and the world it

represents, but to include the judgements and emotions of the describer

(Becker 27-28)11

.

Therefore, according to the rhetorical handbooks there should be two imaginations

involved; the ekphrastic description should evoke the imaginations and experiences

of both the describer and the viewer. This is to be achieved through thauma, which

literally means “marvel, astonishment, wonder, or amazement”. Through thauma, the

description becomes a marvel between the referent and the describer, the describer

and audience, and audience and referent. Commenting on thauma as a strong simile,

Becker states that “in this way, ekphrasis encourages both acceptance of the illusion

that we are viewers and awareness of the describer who creates the illusion” (35) and

by including the desriber‟s emotions “the illusion is not actually broken but rather

colored” (29). Consequently, it is clear that the progymnasmatic handbooks focus on

of the narrative” (Spengel 493) and Theon argued that the style of the description should not be “out of tune with

their narrative” (Spengel 120). 11 Emphasis added.

59

the idea that a description should encourage its audience to enter the world that is

being vividy described and that the presenter and the audience are invited to take part

in this description process by filling the gaps of the description and filtering the

description through their own imaginations. These ideas were popular, as it is going

to be explained in the following sections, until the eighteenth century although it

should be remembered that the progymnasmatic suggestions basically concerned the

interest of the students of rhetoric in ancient Greece and were initially applied in

early Greek poetry.

Apart from the general charcteristics of ekphrasis, the matter of classification should

also be mentioned. Whether ekphrasis is a genre, a way of discourse or a literary

device has been a question for critics and men of literature. The common assumption

is that ekphrasis is a literary mode or a rhetorical technique. Spitzer, for instance,

argues that ekphrasis is a way of discourse that calls for “artistic expressivity” and

thus enabling the transfer from one work of art to another (28). Similarly Bosveld

believes it to be a literary expression that alters the visual and brings it “back from

the dead… [in order to] unlock the mysteries of the painting and grow an

appreciation for the art and artist” (2). For Becker, there is “no separate type of

„visual‟ poetry... [or no] unique kind of poetry, distinguished in its poetics” as

ekphrasis because ekphrasis can be easily generalized into ways of responding while

it would also be possible to regard any poem on representation and visuality as

ekphrastic should the definition of ekphrasis be limited with mimesis, description or

illustration (44). There are only a few idealistic approaches, however, that claim that

ekphrasis is a genre or an independent literary style. Verdonk, for example, argue

60

that ekphrasis has experienced a dramatic change from ekphrasis the description to

the ekphrasis the genre (“Painting” 231) while Graham regards ekphrasis as more

than a literary device (467). It is, however, clear that ekphrasis does not necessarily

require a special poetic language although the relationship between the media of

ekphrasis could be studied in particular ways of analysis. Because ekphrasis, as a

literary way of expression, requires a close and concentrated focus on and a sensivity

to the moment in which the intertextual and inter-referential relations between a

painting and a poem meet, Stylistics is one of the most prolific methods that may

help one to understand these relationships as it has been put forward in the

introductory chapter.

Finally, considering the general qualities of the term, it is feasible to claim that

ekphrasis, or the “text-painting” (Marin Sublime 30), is an artistic instance and it is

never passive or inactive, at least during its creation. Whether based on vivid

description or dramatic narration, it is an experience of immediate response and a

product and culmination of mind-stirring process. In other words, ekphrasis is not a

mere interpretation or report but rather an expression that implies the involvement of

the imaginations of the painter, the poet and the reader12

. Both painting and poetry

are thought-provoking and inspiring activities within themselves and for viewers and

readers and therefore their union produces a doubled interaction and stimulation or as

Plato claims when they are placed next to one another, “[painting and poetry] seem

to talk to you as if they were intelligent” (qtd. in Foster and Prevallet xv). The

12 Carrier focuses on the distinction between ekphrasis and interpretation as follows:

An ekphrasis tells the story represented, only incidentally describing pictoral composition. An

interpretation gives a systematic analysis of composition. Ekphrases are not concerned with visual

precedents. Interpretations explain how inherited schemas are modified (“Ekphrasis” 21).

61

“intelligence” of paintings and poems is surely a metaphor although the formula

becomes one of instantaneous act of creation when human factor (painter, poet,

viewer, or reader) and human intelligence are added to ekphrastic exercises.

62

2.2. The Sisterhood: Sisters or Antagonists?

The relationship between poetry and painting has long been regarded as a familial

one: that painting and poetry are sisters, even twin sisters. The idea of “sister arts”13

can be traced back to the works of ancient Greek poets such as Simonides (Haines

40). Although their kinship makes sense due to the natural tie of their signification

methods, there is no clear reference or explanation as to how this sisterhood came

into being, why their relation has been described as “sisterhood” or to their parentage

either in the works of ancients, post-Renaissance criticism or elsewhere14

. Yet it is

necessary to consider the origin of this relationship in order to understand the

mimetic ties between painting and poetry although such an inspection is bound to

remain speculative due to the impossibility of reaching accurate historical evidence

about the beginnings of this relation. It would be pragmatic to consider the pre-

historic cave paintings such as the ones in Lascaux, Cussac, Le Marche, Altamira, or

Chauvet to find out about the ancestoral bond between the visual and the verbal.

These cave paintings often depict animals, plants, farming or pagan rituals (Tansuğ

21-24). Because communication was basically oral and a written language based on

representative signs or images did not exist, pre-historic people probably felt the

need to draw pictures either to express the then-orally-unexpressible, to communicate

or even to educate their siblings. Besides, the beginning of history has been

associated with the invention of writing and the periods that preceeded writing has

been termed as “pre-historic” (Trager 19; Gombrich The Story 18; Tansuğ 23).

13 In addition to painting and poetry, music has usually been considered as the third member of the sisterhood

(Bruhn 10-14; Blümner 9; Marin To Destroy 29-30). The term “sister arts” will cover painting and poetry

throughout. 14 The sole reference to the origin of the relation between painting and poetry is found in Hollander who states

that “it is poetry which first likens itself to painting, and not the other way round” (The Gazer’s 5). However,

Hollander refers to Horace‟s idea, which had been introduced by Simonides of Ceos in Plutarch.

63

Therefore, pre-historic drawings had acted as substitutes of the alphabet. In other

words, until writing replaced cave drawings, which could be described as arbitrary

signs, pictorial images had served as the central means of communication by

illustrating the sounds of speech in lines and colours. It is probably due to this

relation between the visual and verbal that the arts have been regarded as sisters.

Nevertheless, the ancestral relation of sisterhood has not been serene; the sisters have

proved to be envious sisters and each have coveted the other to the twentieth century.

This metaphor of “envious sisters,” “antagonist sisters,” or “enemy twins” have been

popular in many of the critical inquiries on ekphrasis almost until the twentieth

century. Introducing the idea of “ut pictura poesis,” Graham focuses on the various

applications and understandings of the term. He claims that the motto may indicate

the verbalization of a painting by a poet with substantial details or references to form

an accurate picture for the reader to visualise and “…this idea was very popular

especially in the eighteenth century when critics examined the nature of metaphor”

(466). The poet‟s interest in the frame, light, background or middle ground of a

picture in order to relate another story, emotion or idea that is not found in the

painting is also essential; in this way “the poet may compete with the painter… to

translate [his work] either literally or spiritually. The poet may, however, be

responding to a painting, simply revealing his reactions rather than attempting in any

way a reproduction” (ibid. 467). The second way of expression15

Graham mentions

could be regarded as the reason behind the “battle of mastery between two rival

systems of representation” (467; Baker et al. 611-2). He further explains that the

15 Graham adds that the reverse is also true when a painter sets up his easel to illustrate a poem (467).

64

paradox of “ut pictura poesis” lies in the poles apart reception of sister arts, which

has been at the heart of “painting against poetry” discussions:

The most usual distinction was that poetry appealed to a man‟s faculty,

reason, while painting was simply and dangerously sensory; or,

conversely, that poetry appealed merely to slow reason while painting

rightly and immediately overwhelmed the viewer through sight, the

greatest of senses, by being clearly imitative of nature, by, to note a

favourite metaphor, „holding up a mirror to life‟ (467).

Simply explained by Graham, the dispute over the necessity, functionality, and

superiority of the sister arts have revolved around the deep philosophical problems

that have been argued since the antiquity. The discuission could be regarded as one

of the different world views, whether one should follow the sensory (the visual, the

image, the surface illustration) or the heavenly (the word, the verbal, the unseen-but-

heard). It is easy to reverse the argument if one is to say that seeing is the greatest of

gifts compared to the perishable sound and a great number of people would like to

hold on to “sight” if they were asked to sacrifice one of them.

Haines remarks that “„sisters‟ is a concept imposed on activities which were in

existence long before philosophers and critics noticed certain affinities between

them, and began to draw systematic analogies on the basis of certain passing

similarities” (40). Indeed, throughout the competition between painting and poetry,

sometimes poetry sometimes painting has been regarded as the superior art. The

earliest explicit example of the rivalry is found in Pindar‟s Nemean, written in 483

BC, two centuries after the composition Homeric poems. Pindar regards that poetry

surpasses illustrative arts like painting and sculpture due to its “greater ability to

65

speak [of] kleos (glory)” (qtd. in Becker 5). Although makers of plastic arts had been

praised and encouraged in certain occasions16

, the “superiority of verbal description

over visual description” was carried on by the ciritics of the sixth to nineth centuries

such as Gregory the Great, Sidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, Savonarola and

Giulio Romano. In a variety of ways, they asserted that paintings are “the scriptures

of the ignorant,” that is for those who could not read (Becker 7; Graham 467)17

.

However, the relations concerning dominance began to change dramatically in the

Renaissance18

. In Italy, where the signs of the Renaissance were observed the first,

the supporters of painting and sculpture began to outnumber those who argued for

the excellence of poetry. In his 1489 work Heptaplus, Pico Della Mirandola adopts

the neo-Platonic view that put the image over writing and claims that since picture

was “a form of revelation, an incarnation of the Word,” it has the ability to relate

reality better than the written symbols, or language, do (qtd. in Graham 467-468)19

.

The argument that painting surpasses poetry revolved around the sentio problem in

these early stages of the Renaissance.

16 Davies mentions the much-praised sculptor Apelles whose horses were so realistic that they seemed like

neighing (176). The Greek painter Zeuxis, who was famous with his life-like drawings such as his grapes that

attracted birds to perch on their branches, had even been celebrated by Plato (Gorgias 453a-c). 17 The idea reappeared in the Renaissance England when the rivalry between the sister arts was associated with

Christian iconography. The idea was that the word of God is the basis of all religion and thus the verbal art should

be kept above the visual art. However, it would not righteous to totally disregard visual arts for Christ “gave not

only the gospels but his picture on Veronica‟s veil,” which shows that painting was seen as a simple alternative to

language. Furthermore, the republican cleric Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England (1662) asserted that the

then-popular illustrated books were, with the pictures, engravings, and emblems in them, were the “books of lay-

men” Thomas Fuller (Graham 467). 18 At this point, it is beneficial to remember that different forms of arts flourished and became dominant in

different geographies. Italy, for instance, experienced the developments in sculpture, music, and painting while in

Germany architecture and music reared as the progressing art forms in the fifteenth century. Similarly, Flemish

painters are regarded as the best painters of the seventeenth-century though Holland could not produce any

noteworthy musicians or poets during the same period. 19 The same idea is also found in G.P Bellori‟s Vite de pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni (1672).

66

The word sentio indicated knowing, understanding, experiencing through senses and

language was thought to fall short to evoke sentio with its arbitrary and aberrant

signification or in Graham‟s words “language symbolizes while painting can imitate

by natural signs” (467). Following Mirandola, hence, the next generations also

regarded the arbitrary symbols of language as a weakness and focused on the

powerful and easily appealing disposition of painting. Ludovico Dolce‟s Trattati

d’arte del Cinquecento Fra Manierismo e Controriforma exemplifies this point.

Dolce is preoccupied with the superiority of painting to such a point that he states

that all poets are painters and poetry can only be regarded as a sub-genre of painting

(155)20

. Nonetheless, the well-known defender of painting in this age is Leon Battista

Alberti. Alberti‟s Della Pittura (1435) could be regarded as the basic source of

painters or those who defended painters against poets21

. The main argument of the

book is that it is the painter who “excites our imagination the most” and the aim is to

defend painter‟s primacy (77). Alberti believes that

…painting was given the highest honour by our ancestors. For, although

almost all other artists were called craftsmen, the painter alone was not

considered in that category. For this reason, I say among my friends that

Narcissus who was changed into a flower, according to the poets, was the

inventor of painting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the

story of Narcissus is most to the point. What else can you call a painting

but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the

water in the fountain? (64).

Painting, as “the flower of every art,” continued its rise especially after Alberti‟s

fervent writings and the heavenly attributions dedicated to painting became popular.

20 Ironically Dolce refers to Dante‟s Divine Comedy in which the traveller, excited upon seeing the magnificence

of bas reliefs in Purgatario (X), meditates upon the limitations of human language while celebrating the power of

expressibility of plastic arts (152-155). 21 Lee, for instance, acknowledges Alberti‟s work as the only source that gives a theoretical introduction to

painting and the relations between sister arts after Vasari‟s Lives (8).

67

Vasari‟s influential The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, which is

regarded as the critical source on the chronology of plastic arts in the early

Renaissance, also associates painting with Genesis and calls painting as the initiator

of all arts, just as Alberti:

…the Most High, after creating the world and adorning the heavens with

shining lights, descended through the limpid air to the solid earth, and by

shaping man, disclosed the first form of sculpture and painting in the

charming invention of things (3).

Vasari and Alberti have been followed by many art historians and critics22

but none

of these works has been as straightforward and prominent as Leonardo da Vinci‟s

Paragone: Il Libro Della Pittura23

. Written in the late fifteenth century, Paragone

clearly places painting over poetry within a paragonal (or comparative) relationship,

which is going to be revisited in the next sections. Comparing painting to poetry, da

Vinci claims that, because painting can both make use of the pure and unchanging

signs in the nature and express the precise moment more effectively whereas poetry

can only imitate these signs, the verbal can never be as efficient as the visual

(Treatise 18). In a note praising Van Dyck‟s oil works, da Vinci also iniated the

“mirror metaphor” that has been referred to in ekphrastic disputes. While he advises

painters who doubt about the naturalness of their works to hold a mirror to the object

they paint and compare it to their works (Literary 529). According to da Vinci,

poetry is unable to check its self-naturality in such a way because it does not work on

22 Among the noteworthy followers of Vasari one may recall Comte de Caylus (Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de

l’Odyssée d’Homére, et de l’Énéide de Virgile, 1757), Joshua Reynolds (Discourses, 1769-90) and J.M.W.

Turner (Lectures, 1811-23). For more on the admirers of Alberti and Vasari see Graham 468-472. 23 Referred to as Paragone henceforth.

68

natural signs and is totally “blind” (ibid. 530)24

. The privilege attributed to painting

in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could be a result of the cultural developments.

It is well-known that arts and science had been co-working throughout the history

and there was little difference between a painter and an astronomer, or between a

sculptor and a composer in terms of social status (Graham 468-469). Especially

during the Renaissance, as each form of art and field of science began to break free

from the combined status of arts and scince, painting began to be considered as a

liberal art, rather than a mere subdivision of “imitative arts” (Ulu “New Voices” 15-

16). Moreover, painters who have been regarded as craftsmen also began to be

regarded as esteemed artists especially in Italy, Germany and then in France,

Holland, and England. Consequently, it is not surprising to see that da Vinci puts the

emphasis on the visual and representational qualities while he also invigorates the

paragonal rivalry between painting and poetry in favour of the former25

.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a balance in the discussions of

superiority26

, followed by more critical and pragmatic investigations on the power

24 Da Vinci develops Horace‟s idea, which had been modified by Simonides of Ceos (as painting is mute poetry

and poetry is speaking picture) by stating that “painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting” (59). This

metaphor was re-popularized in the nineteenth century theorists later on in a parallel form (painting is poetry

which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard and but not seen” (Richter 58). Hollander

shortens this claim as the rivalry between “talky poem” and “mute image” (The Gazer’s 6). 25 Da Vinci‟s argument received much appreciation especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Painters and literary figures like Gilio, Ludovico Dolce, Du Bos, De Piles, and Joseph Addison strictly defended

da Vinci‟s idea that the sense of sight was nobler than any other senses (Lee 57-58). Besides, Lee notes that those

who defended painting against poetry were actually using uncreative forms of Renaissance Mannerism. Many of

them were the painters of the French Academy who had the humanistic view of the Renaissance. They believed

that the most majestic form of painting was historical paintings, then still-life and landscape painting,

respectively. Those who credited poetry as secondary to painting claimed that tragedy was the most moving and

maybe the closest (to painting) type of poetry (ibid. 3-18, 46).

For more on the rivalry between painting and poetry see Stewart (554-555), Rosand (61-105), da Vinci (Treatise

17-8), Sidney (Apologie 19), Dewey (187-224), Ong (The Presence 111-7, 138) and (Interfaces 122-5), Marianne

Shapiro (97-114), Langer (75-89), Heffernan (10-22), George Kennedy (5-14), Thalmann (27, 153, 166),

Whitman (117-8), and Lynn-George (29). 26 Nonetheless, some of the philosophers of the time were still discussing the superiority issues concerning

sisterhood. Kant, for instance, regards poetry as an art of speech while he considers painting as a plastic art and

distinctly different from poetry (51.126). Hegel, who placed plastic arts at the bottom of the so-called hierarchy of

69

relations between the visual and the verbal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One of the earliest attempts of reconciliation was Joseph Trapp‟s Praelectiones

Poeticae (1711) in which he argued that both arts could be combined to appeal to the

wisdom of man (Becker 15; Graham 469)27

. Another attempt came from the French

painter and art historian Poussin who instructed painters “to paint like a poet... with

the unity of action and dramatizations” (Lee 63)28

. Dryden, too, believed that

painting and poetry are “…wrought up to a nobler pitch [and that] they present us

with Images more perfect than the Life in any individual” (qtd. in Landow 6). He

was followed by Thomas de Quincey, whose political pamphlets and literary essays

were influential on the development of the much debated sisterhood, was also

prolific in terms of the reconciliation between the two arts. Although De Quincey

seemed to favour poetry, his writings focused on the idea that the two arts needed

different kinds of reception since one was for the eye and the other for the ear (New

Essays 17)29

. In his essay entitled “Lessing‟s Laocoon,” De Quincey states that both

poets and painters actually scrutinize a single moment in time and this makes them

arts, thought that poetry was the highest form of all arts while Schopenhauer crowns music as the greatests of arts

(Haines 42). In his 1757 work, Edmund Burke, who places painting above poetry, states that a literary work

should not describe appearance, for then it would be merely an inferior representation. For him, a literary work

should rather represent the effect and the beauty of the object (167-171). He further claims that

In reality poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their

business is to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the

mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves (Burke

172).

27 According to Lee, Trapp‟s main source is Benedetto Varchi, whose equalistic idea that poets were after the

passions of the soul and painters of the outerworld receieved little critical appreciation (63). A similar view to

Trapp‟s has been developed by the twentieth-century critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg correspondingly

argues that the essential point to bear in mind is the relationship between the arts, not the individual artistic

qualities of each form of art; therefore, today there is no pure notion of visual or verbal, but a culmination of the

two (41-42). 28 Poussin was against the idea that painters should deal only with bodily beauties for which he was criticized by

Lessing (Lessing 52; Lee 64-66). 29 A very similar idea on the natural relation between the word and the image was developed in the sixth century

by John of Damascus who claimed that “a word is to the hearing what the image is to the sight” (qtd. in Plitz and

Åström 50). Not long after De Quincey, in 1880, Blümner stated that painting and poetry are totally different

because “…one employs colour and lines and the other words and rhythm” (7).

70

analogous (203). Similarly, S.T. Coleridge believed that poetry and plastic arts had

many things in common and they, as a whole, could be metaphorically regarded as a

kind of poetry. Coleridge claims that “all fine arts are different species of poetry”

because each has a rhytm and melody of their own to impress their audiences (“On

the Principles” 220-221).

De Quincey‟s and Coleridge‟s pragmatic and all-embracing ideas have been adopted

and developed by G.H Lewes, George Eliot, Walter Pater, and John Ruskin in the

nineteenth century. John Ruskin and his prominent Modern Painters published in

1856 in three volumes, which also inspired the Pre-Raphaelite movement, changed

the course of the debates by grounding the problems on “the primal inspiration” and

enargeia (Ruskin 335). He begins his argument with the humanistic idea that

painting and poetry were dependent on each other. Under the influence of J.M.W

Turner, the prominent painter of the age and the professor of perspective at the Royal

Academy, Ruskin states that “painting is properly opposed to speaking or writing,

but not to poetry… [because] both painting and speaking are methods of

expression… [while] poetry is the embodiment of either for the noblest purposes”

(qtd. in Landow 1). Ruskin further argues that images come from the empirical mind

and their function is determined by the mental process and in this way the vision and

the perception of that vision in the mind is created. Therefore, for Ruskin, the

concept of vision is central for painters, who ought to paint in exact accordance with

what is seen to avoid conceptual and empirical misjudgement and confusion (Ruskin

335-337; Witemeyer 35-36).

71

Lewes and Eliot, who defy antipictorialist arguments of the previous century30

,

follow the empirical codes presented by Ruskin. Lewes and Eliot argue that images

operate between sensation and thought as “the primitive instruments of thought” and

the verbal representation of images are able to present “to set objects, persons or

scenes before an audience” (Hagstrum 11). Indeed, Eliot makes use of this power of

the words to depict the visual by presenting the setting before moving into the action

of the plot in many of her novels (Witemeyer 42; Eliot The Complete xvi)31

. Walter

Pater‟s comments, subsequently, is like a summary of the arguments put forward by

Ruskin, Lewes, and Eliot. Pater, in his 1873 book, The Renaissance: Studies in Art

and Poetry, adopts Trapp‟s and De Quincey‟s ideas on the reconciliation. He

believes that

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard… all the various

products of arts but translations into different languages of one and the

same fixed quantity of imaginative thought… Each art… has its own

special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities

to its material (130).

Pater‟s attitude to consider each sister art as a liberal and independent way of

expression has been the preferred way to perceive art in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries (Becker 33; Hagstrum 15-20). However, his ideas would not last long if it

were not for the theoretical background put forward by Lessing.

30 Lewes ve Eliot are particularly against Burke who divides painting and poetry as two opposing instances in art

history and defies the verbal in favour of the visual (Hagstrum 153). See Note 26 in Chapter I. 31 Some of the critics agree that George Eliot was very familiar with the work of Lessing who divides arts as

temporal and spatial since Eliot clearly makes use of this division in her works (Hagstrum 12; Witemeyer 39-42;

Becker 46; Eliot The Complete xvi-xvii). Still, with its ability to present what is seen in a more detailed way (as

opposed to painting which can only present things as they are), the verbal is a higher medium of representation

for Eliot. In Middlemarch, for instance, Will Ladislaw, speaking to Naumann, says “And what is a portrait of a

woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all… Language is a finer medium… Language gives us a

fuller image, which is all the better for being vague” (291-292).

72

There is little doubt that the most influential suggestions on the sister arts belong to

Lessing32

. Lessing takes sides in the sisterhood discussion by “privileging… the

printed or spoken word as the highest from of intellectual practice” (Braida and Prieri

15)33

in order “…to re-establish poetry in its proper place” (Lessing xxvii; 45) and

this has often been regarded as a “textual turn.” According to Lessing the translation

of the image into action is worthier than representing the image because words can

change “beauty into charm” and “charm is beauty in motion and for that reason less

suitable to the painter than the poet” (ibid. 112). However Lessing‟s main

contribution has been regarded as the division of the art forms as temporal and

spatial. This oft-cited interpretation defends that visual arts can only be in

relationship with bodies in space while verbal arts work within time34

. In other

words, painting35

can attempt to imitate actions only by suggesting them within

spatial limitations, that is, the canvas; hence painting is restricted for it cannot

represent actions but can only freeze them in a single moment on the canvas and

suggest the action. Poetry, on the other hand, tries to represent bodies in action, that

is, in time, and its lack of physical or natural connection to the referent (since poetry

uses arbitrary signs that can appeal to ideas rather than images) frees it from the

limitations of the visual arts (Lessing 7).

32 Many sources such as Heffernan, Becker, Wagner, Hollander, Hagstrum, Lee and Graham feel the need to

initiate their arguments by revisiting Lessing as the primary source of the sisterhood issue. 33 Lessing owes this idea to his friend Moses Mendelssohn‟s On the Main Principles of Fine Arts and Belles

Lettres (1757) and Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger‟s Discourses of the Painters (1717-1722)

(Lessing xix). Other sources he makes use of are Phillippe de Tubiéres and Count Caylus‟s Tableaux tirés de

l’Iliade, de l’Odysseé d’Homére et de l’Énéide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume (which

he criticizes) and Joachim Wincklemann‟s Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture

(1755) (Méndez-Ramirez 24-5; Lessing xix-xx). 34 See Erinç for details on time and space arguments in arts (9-17). 35 Here and elsewhere in his book, Lessing uses the words “painting,” “visual arts,” and “sculpture”

interchangibly (6).

73

Lessing‟s argument based on the temporal and spatial distinction of the sister arts has

received much appreciation36

. In fact the majority of the twentieth-century debates

on ekphrasis have revolved around the verbal-temporal-against-visual-spatial

contradiction. Although the following sections will deal with the twentieth-century

arguments on the subject, it is necessary to keep in mind that modern theories on

ekphrasis inescapably refer to Lessing, Ruskin, Pater, De Quincey, and the other

theorists of the nineteenth century who had written on the sisterhood37

.

All in all, in the light of the presented arguments on the sister arts, twentieth-century

critics seem to agree on the vitality of two points concerning the relationship between

the sister arts. First of all, painting and poetry use different media to communicate

with their audience and this difference creates “some kind of productive or creative

interplay between word and image” (Baker-Smith 1002). At this point, for some of

the critics, painting has more advantage in the present age since it can “…gather the

freedoms it had so long envied… as [it] move[s] towards abstraction…” (Philips 8).

Secondly, the image-dominated twentieth century witnesses a harsher challenge

between the sister arts; while poetry, which “…is expected to call the image to mind,

to conjure it up, as it were” in a variety of ways by using sounds and words (Verdonk

“Painting” 235) tries “to overcome the power of the image by transforming and

36 Lessing‟s basic distinction between spatial mode of painting and the temporal mode of poetry has been

defended by prominent philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller until the twentieth century (Graham 474).

Graham, however, who believes that “the entire problem is a very rich one not yet resolved” (475). He argues that

the problem should not be regarded as a simple issue because if the period and the culture of the ekphrastic poem

is considered, „time‟ also becomes an element that requires attention for plastic arts (ibid. 475). A similar view is

shared in Irving Babbitt‟s 1910 book, The New Laokoön: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts. The work

regards the eighteenth-century ekphrasis as dehumanising because of the so-called action-status battle (12).

Nevertheless, both of these views consider “time” as the chronological “time;” this makes their understanding of

“time” external to the problems because the “time” Lessing focuses on is not the chronological time but the

“temporal” time that works within the artwork. 37 Among other critics who have written on the subject in England are Drayton, Pope, James Harris and Joseph

Spence. The majority of these figures, especially Harris and Addison, believed that poetry is superior to painting

because it is not restricted to momentary events. For that reason they could be considered as the followers of

Lessing (Lessing xvi).

74

inscribing it” (Wagner 13), painting tries to surpass poetry by arguing that “a text

cannot exist as a hermetic or self-sufficient entity” without relying on the power of

the images (Braida and Prieri 18). Thus the rivalry between the sisters is never static

and within the so-called paradoxical battle between the two, each form of art carries

the risk of “…weakening itself of its own unique strengths… while seeking the

strength of the other” (Haines 45)38

.

38 Similar suggestions have been made by Greenberg (43-44) and Lessing (130-135).

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2.3. Mimesis and Ekphrasis

Dating back to the fifth century BC mimesis literally means reflection or

“representation, which relates to verisimilitude” (Cuddon 512; Harvey 5; Greenber

23). As a term, it has often been associated with Plato, who makes a clear distinction

between eidea (“idea” or “master concept”) and eidola (“reflection” or “surface

appearance”). According to Plato, the world we live in only provides mimesis,

reflecting the eidolas of the eideas which exist as supra-conceptual beings in a world

invisible to human eyes. Therefore, while eidea can only be understood conceptually

through philosophizing, mimesis alienates the eidea by providing superficial

appearances. This is the reason why Plato places craftsmen over artists (painters,

playwrights, poets and sculptors) because artists‟ products can only provide a copy

(painting) of a copy (an object, place, or figure) of the eidea (Sophist 267; Republic

3-394e-3-396a).

This is also the reason why along with many of his intiative ideas and questions,

Plato is known with his severe criticism of imitative arts. For Plato painting and

poetry can simply be called imitative arts as they are able to represent only the

reflections of the eidea world. In Pheadrus, for instance, Socrates tries to convince

Pheadrus on the mimetic similarities between painting and writing with following

claims:

You know, Phaedrus, that‟s the strange thing about writing, which makes

it truly analogous to painting. The painter‟s products stand before us as

though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most

majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to

you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what

76

they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the

same thing forever (275d).

The basic point in this argument is not the resemblances between writing and

painting but Plato‟s awareness of the distinction between the media these arts make

use of. In today‟s terms, Plato‟s argument could be transcribed by pointing out that

these two arts, through different signifying systems, reproduce a representation; one

using natural signs (images) and the other using arbitrary signs (words)39

. This

argument, that the most obvious difference between painting and poetry is the

difference between the materials they use, has been dominant in the discussion of

sisterhood and supremacy40

.

Plato‟s student Aristotle, in a way, rescued imitative arts from his master‟s harsh

disapproval and began to question his master (Braida and Prieri 11). Although

Aristotle, in his Poetics, is not openly concerned with the nature of poetry, there are

clear references to the art of “making poems” (Else 9). In fact, the opening chapter of

Poetics deals with differences between the poetic arts (music, drama, poetry, rhetoric

and the like) and other productive arts (house-building, harness making and so on)

and, unlike Plato, who had condemned imitative arts, he begins the discussion on

imitative arts by claiming that “metaphor is a gift”41

by putting the emphasis on the

idea that imitation is both necessary and functional (59a4-8). Aristotle regards the

imitative arts not as obstacles to understanding the truth but as an auxiliary vehicle

that help man conceive the ways of the world. For him, works of art, especially oral

39 See Pheadrus for further details of this discussion (especially 273a-c, 277a-d). 40 See the previous section (2.2) on the sister-arts. 41 Here and elsewhere in Poetics, the word “metaphor” is used to mean “imitation” and “representation” (51a,

51b, 57a, 59a, 59c).

77

and dramatic arts, represent the truth in its absence; in other words, poetry and drama

present the stories, acts, and characters that one may not always meet. No matter how

didactic it may sound, Aristotle‟s defence establishes poetry to its original roots

(Aristotle xv). Regarding mimesis as a “master concept” in poetry, Schwartz

comments on Aristotle‟s argument with the following clarification (1):

The mimetic process in the poetic arts is more difficult to understand

than it is in the other arts because the poet‟s medium is language, and

language has a multiplicity of common uses other than the making of

poetry. Our ordinary use of language is self-expressive and practical…

[but] we use language mimetically. Only the poet does that; that, says

Aristotle, is what distinguishes him as a poet (Schwartz 6-7)42

.

As Schwartz explains, Aristotle‟s point is not only to distinguish arts from mimicry

but also to emphasize that arts are mimetic in nature. Mimesis, therefore, for

Aristotle does not refer to purely imitative and copycat acts. Rather, it evokes

creativity, inspiration, and innovation.

Aristotle‟s ideas on mimesis, along with Plato‟s criticism, have been regarded crucial

in arguments concerning the mimetic nature of ekphrasis. Especially after the

Renaissance and seventeenth-century emphasis on the individual followed by the

modern theories on arts, mimesis has been revisited in order to better understand the

representational nature of ekphrastic activities (Bruhn 7; Moran 19, 39, 101; Braida

and Prieri 16; Ulu “New Voices” 140-155). As far as the mimetic theory is

concerned, the established view inherited from the theoretical claims between the

Renaissance and the twentieth century provides the vitality of the artistic

42 Emphasis added.

78

involvement43

. Coleridge‟s decisive statement, “if there be likeness to nature without

any check of difference, the result is disgusting; and the more complete the delusion,

the more loathsome the effect” (“Poesy of Art” 256), has formed the basis of this

notion. Therefore, it has usually been thought that mimesis should not be based on

“formal similarity” but on transitiveness (Schwartz 4); and as for poetry, poet‟s job

has correspondingly been formulated to represent human speech, melody, rhythm,

character and nature through his individual filter. Because if mimesis is to copy

nature as it is,

…then the artist is indeed superfluous, for the tape recorder or camera

can copy nature more exactly than poet or painter. The simple-copy

theory also implies that the value of a work resides in its fidelity to

external reality, not in some inherent excellence – and this is palpably

false. The fact that mimesis involves dissimilarity as well as similarity

also argues against any literal view of imitation (Schwartz 5).

So mimesis could never be singled down to a carbon copy act. The ekphrastic poet,

then, does not plainly copy nature or human language but creates an original way of

expression which has some likeness to actual human speeches and acts or objects in

the nature.

A considerable amount of critics have argued for the need of creativity and artistry in

mimesis in ekphrasis and other art forms explained above. Lévi-Strauss, for instance,

believes that if the produced work is a mechanical copy of its source, then that end

43 Some technical developments concerning the history of painting have influenced the theories on perception,

light, and perspective such as Brunellesco‟s optical box designed in the late seventeenth century. The optical box

aimed to establish structural equivalence between the point of view and the vanishing point in the pro-duction

(Vor-stellung) while it allowed the gaze and the eye to be equivalent (in the sense that it submits the gaze to the

eye) by way of “its geometrical and optical law” (Marin To Destroy 46). More on these innovations concerning

painting will be presented in the following sections.

79

product cannot be an artwork but an object (Charbonnier 108). Nelson Goodman,

claiming that the systems of pictorial representations are different from the systems

of linguistics representations, argues that the two systems could only meet at a level

of aesthetic culmination if they are filtered through poet‟s imagination (Davies 174).

Heffernan opposes the traditional idea that “the virtuosity of a representational work

of art is measured by its fidelity to nature” by stating that

The consciousness of difference – the sense of friction between the

medium and the subject matter of a work of art – is precisely what makes

the difference between a copy and an imitation, or between delusion or

an aesthetic illusion (37).

Hence it is appropriate to say that the traditional idea of mimesis has long been out of

favour except for a few critics who defend the necessity of sticking to the idea that

artists should aim to produce one-to-one representation of their objects44

.

Another point to consider in the twentieth-century understanding of mimesis is the

relation between narrative and depiction. Gerard Genette claims that the duty of

mimesis is to define narration as depiction of objects or people in movement, and

44 One of these critics is Friedländer, who is “the owner of the only thorough study on the history of ekphrasis”

for Becker (9). Friedländer‟s work, which covers ekphrasis from Homer to the sixteenth century, assumes that

“true description is the representation of the surface appearance of a work of visual art” and thus ekphrasis should

try to represent, as faithfully as possible, the visible features (qtd. in Becker 1-2). Homer, for instance, is easily

carried away with stories and dramatization and falls from true description according to Friedländer (ibid. 2). No

direct references are given to Friedländer throughout this study since his work, which is in German, has not been

translated into English. Apart from Friedländer, Lukacs, too, regards ekphrasis as a descriptive device that

represents and describes its object as clearly as possible (Yavuz 26). Referring to the descriptive discourses that

have experienced a drastic change after the nineteenth century due to the rise of the individual or the urban,

Lukacs states that description, which is the core of ekphrastic exercise, should dominate the text and it should

become the text itself (Lukacs 110-148; Yavuz 26-27). Buchbinder, on the other hand, believes that the value of a

depiction should be judged according to the nature of representation. By this term he means the nature of reality

and its realtion to representation and the question how the representation of reality is accomplished or subverted

and denied (3-4).

80

description as the depiction of objects and people in statis (Figures 57)45

. Similarly

Schwartz argues that mimesis, which works with signs or images, should be regarded

as a tool that depicts and narrates the images and ideas in their absence (9)46

.

Accoring to this notion, mimesis has two basic functions. One of them is, as it has

been developed by the ancients, to mirror the objects “in statis” and freeze them in a

single moment by giving their true-to-life description. The other is to relate the

objects that are in action and to narrate their story. This shows that, although both of

the functions were familiar to the ancient epic writers like Homer and Virgil,

mimesis, at least mimesis in poetry, does not simply present the detailed models of

objects in space but it provides motion and gesture through narrative depiction. At

this point, it is necessary to recall Riffaterre‟s ideas on mimesis. Riffaterre claims

that mimesis could never be taken as a simplistic literary act for it is in the nature of

mimesis to refer to the biographical, historical, social, economic, realities outside the

object while describing it (Buchbinder 5). For Riffaterre, as a semiotician, it is the

job of semiotic theories to foreground these signifying mimetic structures47

. He puts

forward “two different semiotic operations of transformation of mimetic signs into

words and phrases relevant to siginificance, and the transformation from matrix to

text” and believes that these rules govern the “verbal mechanisms of sign integration

from mimesis to significance level” (Riffaterre Semiotics 21-22). One of them is

termed as hypogrammatic rule by Riffaterre to refer to the study of lexical

45 Genette strongly opposes C.S. Baldwin‟s claim that mimesis “frustrates narrative movement” especially in

ekphrastic texts (Figures 55-57; Baldwin 19). 46 Defining the sign Schwart recalls that the scholastics had defined the sign “...as that which makes known to a

cognitive power something other than itself…” (9). He further explains that the sign takes the place of the thing to

which it refers, and it makes this referent present to the mind: “...thus nothing can be a sign of itself, a sign must

refer – must stand for something else. And it makes this other thing known” (ibid. 9).

A likewise understanding of the sign, or the referent, is presented in the following paragraphs while dealing with

the assumprions put forward by Derrida. 47 Riffaterre thinks that practitioners of mimetic theories also frequently begin with a semiotic reading of mimetic

elements in a poetic text although they deny the necessity of Semiotics. Besides, a semiotician also feels the need

to turn to mimetic theories while looking for semiotic and stylistic structures in a text (Semiotics 20).

81

actualization, stereotypes, decriptive systems in textual mimesis and the other is

expansion, which refers to the interpretation of these underlying mimetic elements

under the cover of depiction and narration (ibid. 22)48

.

Structuralists and semioticians like Riffaterre, thus, have not devalued mimesis as a

literary act that merely functions as a pictorial element. More radical ideas have been

put for forward during the course of the twentieth century on artistic representation.

For instance, Victor Shklovsky‟s suggestion to defamiliarize objects illustrates the

break from the idea of mimicry and one-to-one imitation of the object. For him

…the technique of art is to make object “unfamiliar,” to make forms

difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the

process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of the object; the object is not

important (12)49

.

The rupture from the traditional idea of mimesis has gradually become clearer as new

forms and modes of art came into being such as Impressionism, Abstract Art,

Cubism and Futurism, each of which have taken the idea of the involvement of the

artist for granted. Finally, although ekphrasis, as “an iconic story… [representing]

the narrative moment… [in] timeless presences,” is consequently and basically a

product of mimetic exercise and artist‟s creation, the relationship between mimesis

and ekphrasis is in a risky position (Marin To Destroy 55); it has not ended but the

48 See part 2.4 for more on the function of Semiotics and Stylistics. 49 Original emphasis. This idea has been much criticised for its elaborate focus on structure and its tendency to

dissolve the organic unity of pems. Schwartz, for example, says: “My own view is that poetic language does

„defamiliarize‟ and so intensify perception, but that this serves a further end in facilitating our perception of what

the work „means,‟ of the poet‟s vision” and offers to deal with poetry in its own harmony as a whole (5-6).

82

role of mimesis in this relation has eroded in the complex structure of modern

philosophical and literary theories.

83

2.4. Modern Theories on Ekphrasis

Having covered the essential discussions before the twentieth century, it is

fundamental to consider the modern critical ideas on ekphrasis to understand the

complex philosophical and literary relations of ekphrastic exercises and the sisterly

relation between painting and poetry. Hence, this section aims to cover the critical

debates on ekphrasis especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with

reference to the noteworthy philosophers, art historians, poets, and literary critics.

Louis Marin is one of those theorists who believe that there is need to formulate

some questions in order to find answers to the complicated ekphrastic phenomena.

Therefore he begins to investigate the issue by asking about the possibility of a visual

language embedded in paintings that could be translated into verbal signs:

How does one go about discovering a way into a painting? And why does

one even need to comment on a painting if the end envisaged by the

painter‟s action can be achieved simply by experiencing pleasure or

jouissance?... Is a discourse on painting possible? More precisely, is a

discourse on painting possible that would be different from the discourse

of a given painting? Can there be a verbal metalanguage for the language

of painting? Are all systems of signification to be interpreted through

language? (To Destroy 7-15)50

.

He believes that painting has its special ways to communicate with its audience. Just

as texts, painting contains a “metasemantics” of his own and it is this miraculous

quality of painting that attracts poet‟s “…desire to know and decipher the enigma” in

the paintings (ibid. 7, 16). Marin, then, divides the metalinguistic qualiy of paintings

50 Marin poses similar questions in his Sublime Poussin, where he studies the descriptive imagery and narration:

“Can the general rules of transmutation be defined? What types of transformation are imposed on a linguistic

configuration by the transfer to a visual configuration?” (29).

84

into three. For him, a painting uses the “enigma” either through autorepresentation,

self-referentiality, or a combination of the two (ibid. 16-7). In other words, a painting

may be a realistic one clearly presenting its message as a whole or it may let the

characters, landscape, colours and lines express themselves. According to Marin, as

long as the message or the represented image is created in our minds, the painting is

successful.

The message or the image created in the mind‟s eye is often been called “an idea” in

the twentieth-century criticism. The “idea,” created by imagery or language, is

always dynamic since it is “mobilized by [the] signs” (Marin Sublime 153). Marin

takes this concept of “idea” for granted by acknowledging Foucault, who owes this

concept to Kant and the post-Renaissance humanist epistemology51

:

To represent oneself is simply to cast a glance at the things that present

themselves to our mind… through representation, the things as presence

becomes accessible to the mind in the form of an idea… To speak of

representation in general is thus to rely on a number of theoretical and

historical assumptions concerning discourse and signs as well as on

knowledge relevant to science and to the subject and its relation to being

– in short, on what Foucault has called an episteme… (ibid. 17, 24).

Marin, therefore, puts the emphasis on the effect, or episteme, that a painting leaves

on the poet. For him, the effect may produce inspiration more if the poet does not

know the painting in advance. Otherwise the neutral corrolary becomes disturbed:

51 Commenting on this notion, Davies reminds us that aesthetic experience of an item‟s formal beauty and

sublimity tends “toward the ineffable” (8). He claims that aesthetic experience is not solely perceptual; rather it is

“...infused by a cognitive but non-perceptual process described by Kant as involving the free play of the

imagination and the understanding” (ibid. 8).

85

…the viewer may be unfamiliar with the story represented in the painting

[because]… it turns out that this neutralizing of the eye and gaze, of the

relation between painter and painting, and painting and viewer, is itself

the story expressed in the representational scene and its „frieze‟ of figures

(ibid. 35)52

.

Hence, according to him, if the poet is not acquainted with the painting and if he

meets the visual impact of the painting for the first time, he is able to read “formal

and expressive signs” and the relation between the painting and its background more

adequately (ibid. 31, 102).

Another significant suggestion Marin presents is the idea of diagrammatic or

sequential reading of paintings and poems. Similar to the structuralist view, Marin

offers to read poetry and painting in smaller units, figure by figure, or clause by

clause (Marin Sublime 46-53). Marin believes that this method is especially

applicable to the reading of paintings as it allows the critic to find out about the

similarities, polarities, and parallels in the painting (ibid. 57-66).

52 Marin opposes himself when he excludes mythological and pastoral or religious paintings. He states that the

viewer must be familiar with the story because the text (or the story) actually comes before the painting and this

is a crucial problem for the transformative process between the painting and its viewer (ibid. 56-7).

86

Figure III. Marin’s scheme to “read” paintings (Destroy 59-60)

As seen in Marin‟s proposed scheme, the critic should read the painting from A to b,

B to a, a to b, and A to B, and then should focus on the central points (indicated by

the letter x). In this way, it is possible to see the light, shadow, line, and colour

relations of a painting. Such a reading of paintings is quite efficient because an

uneducated eye may miss the dimensional depth, illumination details, and the

rhythmic movements of figures and bodies in the painting (To Destroy 60).

Although Marin, as an art historian, often turns to philosophy and literary criticism,

there has been little appreciation concerning his commentaries from literary circles.

More critical observations and commentaries on ekphrasis and on the intricate

relation between the visual and the verbal have been made by thinkers, art and

literary critics, and poets. Especially after the second half of the twentieth century,

there has been a substantial increase on the number of works on the complex

structure of ekphrastic exercise. Smith believes that the interest in the relation

87

between painting and poetry is a result of a paradigmatic shift in our perception (2).

Because twentieth-century thought has replaced the conventional idea of mimesis

and the understanding of the concepts such as realism, representation, impression,

and expression has totally changed. This alteration related to the treatment of

ekphrasis is usually conceived as an outcome of the pioneering philosophical and

critical activities presented by theorists such as Krieger, Becker, Heffernan,

Hollander, Derrida and Mitchell in the twentieth century.

One of the essential works on ekphrasis in the twentieth century is Murray Krieger‟s

Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Published in the second half the

twentieth century, Krieger‟s book focuses on Lessing‟s established spatial-temporal

categorization. He argues that a poem achieves its freedom from the temporal flow

that arbitrary signs of language provide. Besides the represented object in the poem

also frees itself from the spatial limits of the frame by becoming “…the metaphor for

the temporal work that seeks to capture its temporality” (Krieger The Illusion 107).

Like Lessing, therefore, Krieger argues for the superiority of the temporal (poetry)

over the spatial and the limited (painting). Krieger‟s categorization of ekphrastic

poetry as descriptive and narrative is thus a result of this understanding. For him an

ekphrastic poem53

fights for dominance either by describing the object (spatial) or

through narration (temporal), either made-up (as in Keats‟s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

or Shelley‟s “Ozymandias”) or historical (as in Lovelace‟s poem on Peter Lilly‟s

painting).

53 Krieger adopts the earlier definition of ekphrasis as any desription of any object (The Illusion 19, 34-35).

88

Krieger‟s grouping has been criticized both for its inclusiveness and function54

. It is

true that categorizing ekphrastic poetry as descriptive and narrative is rather

questionable because an ekphrastic poem may be descriptive or narrative at the same

time as observed in The Iliad, The Odyssey, and “The Rape of Lucrece.” Davidson,

for instance, denounces the need of such categorization and accuses Krieger of “self-

enclosure” (72) while Heffernan calls this classification “too broad” (Museum 3).

Instead of Krieger‟s model, Davidson proposes another diachronic duality by

dividing ekphrastic poetry into two. He believes that some of the ekphrastic poems

are written about a visual work and he refers to these poems as “the classical painter

poem” (72). Such poems are purely descriptive poems describing its subjects as they

are freezed in time and this category immediately reminds us Genette‟s comments on

mimesis as description. The other kind of poem is “painterly poem,” which

“…activates strategies of composition equivalent to but not dependent on the

painting itself,” such as Ashbery‟s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (ibid. 72). In a

way, painterly poems deal with the story represented by the image on the canvas.

However, according to Heffernan, this attempt is just to replace Krieger‟s

classification with a more “polarized” idea (Museum 3). Indeed, both Krieger and

Davidson seem to disregard the fact that the text at hand is a poem, a complex entity

to be classified in this way. It is possible to claim that neither Krieger‟s ontological

classification nor Davidson‟s seemingly pragmatic and straightforward definitions

are able to satisfy the needs of the complicated ekphrastic apparati.

54 One of the few commentaries that is in harmony with Krieger‟s belong to Joseph Frank, who believes that

“new descriptive categories” should be formulated for ekphrasis (204). Frank believes that, in modern

ekphrasis,“poets undermine the temporality of language, allowing the reader to perceive the images in the poem

not in the linear flow of time but as juxtaposed in space” (ibid. 200).

89

Becker, whose The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis provides a

detailed analysis of the ekphrastic narrative in the Iliad, has attempted to replace

former categorizations of ekphrasis. According to him, ekphrasis is a more intricate

phenomenon and hence it requires a more complex structural method that can

“dissolve the subject” in a deconstructive manner (Sarup 2). He divides levels of

representation in ekphrastic exercise into four. The first step is res ipsae, “a focus on

events and characters that constitute the subject matter of picture” (Becker 40-41). In

this level, which acts like a “naming process,” description is based upon “the

recognition and elaboration of what is described by the image” (ibid. 42). The second

step is termed opus ipsum, which is “a focus on the physical medium,” and it refers

to the surface appearance of the work of visual art. Opus ipsum also serves to

defamiliarize the object by “calling attention not to the world [the image], but to the

window through which we see it” (ibid. 42-43)55

. The third level, artifex and ars,

focuses on the creator, creation of the work of art, and their relation to the medium

and the referent respectively. It is the instance where the imagination of the poet and

visual image meet. The final stage is animadversor, which is based on the effect of

reaction of the audience. For Becker, this phase calls attention to the interpreter

between the audience and the work and to the verbal medium into which these

images are translated (ibid. 43).

During the course of this study, no ciritical commentary from other theoreticians has

been found on Becker‟s classification but it is obvious that Becker, whose suggested

ekphrastic stages rely on the earliest examples of ekphrasis such as The Iliad, The

55 Becker reminds us that this defamiliarization is not the same as Russian formalists‟. Rather he refers to the

depiction of color, shape, and texture in the work of visual art (ibid. 42-43).

90

Odyssey, and Metamorphoses, falls short to consider the multifaceted ekphrastic

relations presented in Figure II. To put it another way, Becker‟s suggestions,

therefore, are purely linear and ignore the painting-poem, painter-poet, and painting-

poet relations that communicate with one another.

Another classification belongs to Lynn Marsico and Rogers Capa56

. Marsico and

Capa, unlike Krieger and Becker, follow Davidson‟s method to study ekphrastic

exercises contextually. According to them, there are eight types of ekphrastic poetry

and each of them is termed with their explanations. These are:

1) Giving voice

2) Praising art

3) Using the artwork to examine personal issues

4) Close study of a single artist

5) Wiriting in response to abstract art

6) Recreation of the visual object through verbal means

7) Creating narratives from the art

8) Museum ekphrasis

(Marsico and Capa 210-211).

As it is going to be explained in the following paragraphs, compared to structural and

mechanical classifications, contextual groupings provide more pragmatic and

accurate results. However, Marsico and Capa‟s model too occasional to be

considered as a well-set classification because only a limited number of poems can

be applied to each of these categories. Besides their insistence on the limits of these

groups makes it hard to decide which poem falls into which category.

56 Marsico and Capa acknowledge Terry Balckhawk as their primary source while formulating these categories

(210).

91

Classifications as Marsico and Capa‟s, Krieger‟s, Davidson‟s and Becker‟s are

undoubtedly important academic and critical contributions to the study of ekphrasis.

Nonetheless it is evident that these categorized groups are not products of vital

critical and philosophical ideas. Rather they seem to serve particular aims or they are

merely occasional and limited to particular canonized examples of ekphrastic poetry

except for Davidson‟s contextual grouping. At this point, it is necessary to turn to the

essential twentieth-century intellectual developments in literary criticism concerning

the progress of ekphrastic criticism and poetry.

It is indispensable to refer to a thinker like Derrida who has written much on texts,

paintings, and images while studying the relation between the verbal and the visual.

One of the vital concepts Derrida puts forward while analysing this relation is

effacer. The word effacer literally means “to erase, efface, obliterate an inscription,

or rub (especially inscription) out.” Derrida regards this concept as a metaphorical

act to cover up, or to patch up, the old signs, lines, and textures on the canvas. He

believes that a text could be taken as a canvas (or a canvas as a text) and each

revision made on the text (or on the canvas) is efface the text and thus an attempt to

cover, hide, cross out and even delete the original image or word (The Archeology

19-20). So what the ekphrastic poem does is to refer to an already modified visual

image and to change, illustrate, and express it in a further modified way with a

different system of signs. Effacer continues with suppléer. The English equivalent of

the verb suppléer is “to fill in, to supply, or to provide.” However Derrida makes use

of the word to imply maintenance and prolongation. The altered image that has been

turned into words continues to exist in a different way and its existence, though

92

problematic, substitutes the former way of expression and supplies it with a

transformed and even malformed arrangement (ibid. 23-26).

These relations, as in many of Derrida‟s works, are phenomenological and based on

presence-absence and was-is-to-be associations57

. Thus it is possible to claim that

Derrida‟s arguments on the interconnection between arts revolve around the ultimate

philosophical question of being and reminds us the paragonal rivalry da Vinci had

discussed in the fifteenth century:

Every presence is therefore contaminated by absence, for meaning exists

in consciousness as a presence only because of the phonemic, graphemic,

perceptual, and conceptual differences between it and absent terms

(Mack Smith 29).

Consequently, Derrida, as opposed to the art historical conventions dealing with the

visual-verbal relation, does not simply focus on the sign, message or the surface

meaning of the image and the text but he draws attention to “any philosophy of

language or perception positing Being as presence” (Smith 29) and the ultimate

quality of such a presence, whether visual or verbal, is designated by “names” (ibid.

292). Transferring Derrida‟s assumptions to the field of ekphrasis, it is possible to

claim that an ekphrastic poem carries the signs of its absent source, the unavailable

57 Mack Smith suggests that Derrida is indebted to Husserl and his phenomenological arguments concerning the

idea of “the suspension of the natural standpoint as a foundation of perception,” which have been brought

together in the term epochē (29). The term is related to the fundamental notions of phenomenology such as

“presence of absence” or “absence in presence” as it is presented in the following paragraphs. Comparably, while

commenting on the importance and complexity of “presence through existence” and on the limits of language to

relate “presence,” Marin states that presence, unlike absence, can only be indicated by the verb etre (to be), as

“the basic kernel of all verbs”(To Destroy 20-21). The verb “to be,” according to Marin, “…designates the being

that all nouns signify… [and] all verbs are reducible to the present indicative of [this] verb” (ibid. 21) and

therefore only through a logico-grammatical analysis (referring to his term diagrammatic reading) can a study

reveal the importance of the sense of presence created by the verb “to be.”

93

painting, as it is read or studied by its audience. The visual, then, though absent, is

yet able to communicate through the poem, the poem-effacer. Moreover the

paradoxical presence of the painting in its absence could only be achieved by the

poem‟s clear reference, that is, by naming the painting. It is probably due to this

reason that many ekphrastic poets feel the need to “name” the paintings that inspire

them, either in their titles or within their texts58

.

The problem of presence, both for the image and the word, leads to one of Derrida‟s

master concepts: differance. Derrida believes that no sign system shares a fixed

meaning since fixation of meaning is impossible. Rather than a predetermined and

preset meaning, each text, whether verbal, visual, or semiotic, is overrun and

contaminated with the interplay of the signs or the “play of differences” it contains

(Smith 41). Defined by Derrida as “…the systematic play of differences, of the traces

of differences, of the spacing by means which elements are related to each another”

(Positions 27)59

, differance inevitably requires another term, trace60

. Trace, like

differance, could be regarded as a term to understand the absence of presence in a

text. It could be likened to a metaphysical tool that helps us to deconstruct the

meaning in a text by exposing certain presupposed points in that text. For Derrida,

58 See Heffernan‟s categorization of ekphrasis as notional and actual in the following paragraphs. 59 A parallel idea is also put forward by Wittgenstein who believes that reality or the real knowledge about texts

could only be achieved by an understanding of language plays because reality itself is constructed upon these

plays or differances, in Derridean terms (Mack Smith 40). Correspondingly, Davies argues that it is because of

these language plays that the “potentially rich and complex” postmodern literary modes like “allusion, pastiche,

quotation, caricature, homage” have become crucial and popular in postmodern literature (93). Likewise, Mason,

too, believes that it is the language plays that produce meaning in a language by referring to Wittgenstein:

“...some of our speech acts can rightly be called illocutionary acts of describing the world. There are... language-

games of describing... [which] determine what counts as a good description and what a bad one, internal to the

game which is played” (39).

Sarup‟s description of postmodern thought, along with the question of sublimity, representations, and discourse

strategies, correspondingly focuses on the “appeal of language plays” (150). 60 Although it has not been argued earlier, Derrida‟s trace could be likened to a Jakobsonian term, in absentia,

which referes to the quality of a text that refers to objects or texts that are available at the time of referring (Talbot

J. Taylor 57). In this respect, both trace and in absentia recall absence, rather than presence.

94

It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all

determination of content, of the pure movement which produces

difference. The pure trace is difference (Of Grammatology 62)61

.

When applied to ekphrasis, it is clear that trace is not the physical trace of the

painting found in the poem. The term should be understood as the next step of

differance, as the outcome of the differentiating and active signs in a particular text.

In other words, trace is the final step that defines the ontological identity of a text or

in a more phenomenological way “the not-now [textual differance] discomforting the

now [fixation of the signs] is the other to which the sign [text] must refer for self-

identity [textual presence]” (Smith 30). This interaction at work in the text regarding

differance and trace results in a new creation and construction of meaning. Each time

a text is read or interpreted, a new writing takes place and the text, or the meaning of

the text is reproduced due to the ever-active and interplaying signs. This is because

Derrida regards reading, interpreting, and writing as re-writing and re-producing,

causing the original text, or the ur-text in the postmodern sense, become an “other”

or an “outsider” to the reproduced (Derrida The Archeology 92; Of Grammatology

84-110)62

.

61 Original emphasis. 62 Correspondingly Marin argues that writing or interpreting is actually a re-textualization process.The writing

Marin is referring to is not the original writing or textualization of a text but the rewriting of it because:

…[original] writing could be said to exist only in the past. This idea is paradoxical indeed, for I

could easily make exactly the opposite claim: the fleeting nature of speech entails a perpetual

vacillation between „already‟ and „no longer…‟ [Re]writing, on the other hand, is always present

in its traces… Although historical stories were written by someone, when I read, the effect of

reading leads me to overlook the fact that the text was written. Indeed, the text articulates a

paradoxical injunction: „Remember to forget‟ (To Destroy 25).

The same notion as Marin‟s motto “remember to forget” is surprisingly found in Derrida, too, when he states that

the ultimate purpose of writing is to forget (Archieve 12-15; 110-116).

95

Parallel to this idea, Derrida, in his The Truth in Painting, opposes the Kantian

categorization of ergon and parergon, two elements a painting encloses. Ergon refers

to the centralized individual work while parergon evokes the marginalized

adornments of framing, drapery, or colonnades. Traditionally erga, the structural and

contextual unity of paintings, is thought to come before parerga, the supplementary

materials around paintings. Derrida claims that such a subordination of “the other” or

“the outer” cannot be applied to works of visual art because the complementary

(parergon) usually preceeds the painting itself (ergon) (The Truth 54). Ergon, as the

finished work, is bound to exist within the limits of its frame, which, framing the

primary product, cooperates in the meaning making process initiated by the homo

significant63

viewer (ibid. 57-58). Derrida‟s claim holds true within the twentieth-

century idea to preserve the perishable works of visual art since no canvas is kept

without a frame either in museums or in private collections. The differance is again

at play as the driving force in the ergon-parergon relation of dominance and

subordination. However, the crucial point about this argument concerning ekphrasis

is the emphasis put on the contextual and structural limits of paintings. Symbolically

speaking, Derrida states that the limits between the frame and the painting are no

longer valid due to the continuous power relations between the two. Although it

seems irrelevant to the relation between the visual and the verbal, it is essential to

remember that much of the disagreement on the limits and interrelation between

painting and poetry has resulted in debates on the limits of painting. Therefore,

whether a poem describes, refers to, depicts or relates a painting is directly connected

to the boundaries of that painting or to whether it denotes extra-pictorial meanings

63 “Meaning maker;” the coinage is introduced by Chandler (17).

96

outside what it represents. Subsequently, if the image represented on the canvas

moves beyond its framing edges, the beyond-the-frame inexorably becomes

dominant and adds to what the image on the surface on the canvas has to say already.

As it is going to be dealt with in the following parts, some ekphrastic poems are

particularly interested in the additional, or the parergonal, signs and meanings rather

than the ergon itself. Indeed, one of the central arguments in The Truth in Painting is

the multi-referential and multi-layered meanings of paintings. In order to illustrate

this point, one may consider Derrida‟s criticism of Heidegger and Schapiro. While

analysing Van Gogh‟s Old Shoes with Laces, a painting that merely shows a pair of

shoes, Derrida condemns Heidegger‟s and Schapiro‟s simplistic commentaries that

regard the shoes as an allegory of the life itself64

. Before an investigation on the

meaning of the represented image of shoes, Derrida first doubts that the shoes may

not be each other‟s pairs in the first place (ibid. 263-264). His questioning and

analysis, in other words, works not from within the image but from the without the

image, beyond the canvas and its frame. Hence, he warns the audience, who also

takes part in the meaning-making process, to avoid the reading the surface image

only by disregarding what has been left outside the image such as painter‟s

imagination, paintings‟s historical context and background, and the additional

meanings the painting may bring about excluding painter‟s intentions65

.

64 See Heidegger (162-163) and Schapiro (“The Still Life” 205) for details of these commentaries. 65 A similarly central idea is also introduced in his Writing and Difference, where Derrida claims that to write (or

to read) is to reproduce (11). Following Barthes, he further states that meaning is never stable either it is inside or

outside of a text waiting to be discovered. Rather each reading and writing (exercised by the ever-receptive and

ever-suggestive writer or reader) results in a new meaning-making process, defined by Derrida as “incessant

deciphering.” Haines believes that this notion is inevitably in relation with the trace, which refers to the

Derridean initiative that the meaning of each word shifts in relation to the meaning of its neighbours (49).

97

Derrida‟s deconstructive hypotheses, inquiring attitude and philosophical gestures on

the ontological, epistemelogical, and archeological (in the Derridean sense of the

word) aspects of texts and paintings have been quite influential on those who study

the paragonal relation between the visual and the verbal though his views do not

seem to relate to the canonized discussions of ekphrasis straightforwardly. In de

Man‟s words, postmodern ideas, especially Derrida‟s deconstructive attitude, have

taugt the modern critic “to reveal the existence of hidden articulations and

fragmentations within assumed monadic totalities” (249)66

. The following paragraphs

will cover these ideas that have flourished in the light of the already presented

literary and critical developments.

Some of the most appreciated claims on ekphrasis belong to the American literary

critic and poet John Hollander. His distinction between notional and actual

ekphrases has been taken for granted by almost all of those who write on ekphrasis.

Hollander believes that there is a need to differentiate those poems which are written

about “…purely fictional painting or sculpture that is indeed brought into being by

the poetic language itself” (The Gazer’s 4). These poems, classified by Hollander as

poems of notional ekphrasis67

, such as Homer‟s description of the Shield of Achilles

and Hesiod‟s description of the Shield of Herakles, are written on art works that do

66 Like de Man, Culler states that deconstruction has shown the ways to find and understand meaning in texts

(Culler 131). Barbara Johnson echoes Culler and de Man when she states that deconstruction has resulted in “the

careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the texts” (5). 67 Notional ekphrasis may be likened to Eagleton‟s dream-texts, which refer to the made-up stories in dreams.

According to Eagleton, a dream-text is a text composed on unreal situations or unexisting objects or characters

and is shaped and manufactured in a similar way to literary texts, which are also fictional (199). The produced

text, therefore, could be decomposed and deciphered in the same way a literary text is analysed and the similar

process is supported by Hollander (The Gazer’s 7-10).

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not exist or are not known to collectors, critics, or art historians today68

. Actual

ekphrasis, on the other hand, refers to the “…engagement with particular and

identifiable works of art” (ibid. 4)69

. In its core, actual ekphrasis includes

“…addressing the image, making it speak, speaking of it interpretively, meditating

upon the moment of viewing it and so forth” (ibid. 4). The common practice in actual

ekphrasis is to refer to the painter, the painting, the production date, or the owner or

the museum that keeps the painting directly. That is why many examples of actual

ekphrasis especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether “…good and

bad, great and obscure, unglossed or overinterprete,” are entitled like “On

Michelangelo‟s Famous Piece of the Crucifixion” (Edward Young), “Formerly a

Slave: An Idealized Poertrait, by E. Vedder, in the Spring Exhibition of the National

Gallery, 1865” (Hermann Melville), “Museé de Beaux Arts” (W.H. Auden), or

“Monet‟s Water Lillies” (Robert Hayden) (ibid. 4)70

. Hollander, although he does not

focus on its importance, thinks that this shift in tendency from notional ekphrasis to

actual ekphrasis is a result of the establishment of museums and the development of

the idea of preservation (ibid. 10-12; “The Poetics” 209-210). As it is going to be

explained, the opening of the museums was a milestone in the history of ekphrasis

for the protection they provided for the works of art and according to Hollander, it

was after the popularization of museums that the idea „artworks are not perishable‟

was well-established.

68 Other examples Hollander lists are Philostratus‟s Eikones, episodes in Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, and

Spenser, and the majority of the progymnasmatic epigrams (The Gazer’s 4-5). Browning‟s “My Last Duchess”

and Keats‟s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” could also be regarded as notional ekphrasis. 69 Both terms are going to be used in non-italicized fonts hereafter unless there is need to emphasize that the

terms have been introduced by Hollander. 70 See Appendix I for more examples.

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Apart from Hollander, another essential critic who has contributed to the ekphrastic

studies is James A.W. Heffernan, whose book Museum of Words has produced a

considerable amount of critical appreciation. Heffernan examines the relation

between visual artworks and words within a museum visitor perspective. He believes

that ekphrasis, which “first appears as a descriptive detour from the high road of epic

narrative,” is a problematic phenomenon because of the involvement of the painter,

the gazer-poet and the gazer-reader-audience (5). Therefore, he handles ekphrasis as

a gazing issue. Besides, he argues that literary critics have only been regarding the

gazer (poet or audience) as neutral and adds that the act of looking or gazing is

actually “powerfully gendered” (ibid. 1)71

. According to him, there is usually a male

gazer looking at a female (the opposite relation barely occurs) in ekphrastic poetry.

Heffernan does not totally ignore looking at objects but believes that ekphrastic

poems written by looking at objects are also gendered due to the feminine or

masculine discourse dominating a text. Of course, it would be hard to apply this

notion to all ekphrastic poetry but it is true that some ekphrastic poems, like

Browning‟s “My Last Duchess” for instance, noticeably contain such gendered

discourses.

One of Heffernan‟s crucial points on ekphrasis is his tendency to regard modern

ekphrasis distinctly different from classical examples of ekphrasis. He believes that

ekphrasis has changed from the illusionistic and mimetic record of perception to “a

site of sign-production” (ibid. 160)72

because in today‟s art, the artist intentionally

71 See chapters II, III, and IV for references to Heffernan‟s idea of gendered gaze. 72 Heffernan here is referring to classicist notion of art (exemplified by the art historian Gombrich) and the

postmodern, Derridean, and deconstructive understanding of art (exemplified by the semiotician Bryson) (ibid.

160-161).

100

tries to add and produce meanings while composing his work73

. For him, ekphrasis

today represents a new creation which is totally unique and original in its production

and material. As he himself explains,

…ekphrastic poetry is not art history even though modern ekphrasis

approaches the border between the two, and postmodern ekphrasis…

crosses it. Ekphrasis never aims simply to reproduce a work of visual art

in words, so there is no point in judging ekphrastic poetry by a criterion

of fidelity to the work it represents. We can much better judge it by

asking what it enables us to see in the work of art (ibid. 157)74

.

By overlooking the ancient rhetorical duty of ekphrasis, Heffernan at this point

resembles Derrida who, as it has been provided previously, believes that our

conceptual world is dominated by language plays, always producing new meanings

(Sarup 47; Derrida Positions 27). So Heffernan concludes that ekphrasis is a totally

liberated with its meaning-making quality although it seems bound to a source of

inspiration.

Probably more important than Hollander‟s and Heffernan‟s views, W.J.T. Mitchell‟s

theoretical assumptions have been regarded as the foremost suggestions presented in

ekphrastic studies in the twentieth century. While Lessing‟s innovative attitude to

take sides with poetry is called “textual turn,” Mitchell‟s argument on the dominance

of the image is called “pictorial turn.” Mitchell believes that beginning from the early

decades of the twentieth century, the human environment is possessed by an image-

driven culture (Picture 10-11; Iconology 21-24). Turning to da Vinci‟s concept, he

73 The same idea is echoed Strayer. Commenting on Duschamps‟s readymades, he claims that it is the intention of

the artist that makes a work of art an artwork (1-2). Also see Erinç on the essence of artistic intention in arts (20-

21). 74 Emphasis added.

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further states that this image based culture is the platform of a paragonal rivalry

between the visual and the verbal. For that reason, Mitchell believes that ekphrasis,

both as an intertextual literary device and as an artistic creation, is a process of

“otherness” (Picture 155). This “otherness” is explained by Mitchell with his term

limitrophe, referring to the inter-dependence between the verbal and visual on a sort

of signifying contamination (ibid. 220). For him, this contamination brings about

iconophobia, the fear of the powerful image, which is closely related to the

“dangerous supplement” concept (Iconology 113). Then, taking da Vinci‟s argument

one step further, Mitchell claims that ekphrastic texts always involve a tendency to

dominate the image (the other for the verbal) although the visual, with the help of the

pictorial turn in the twentieth century, has shifted the balance of this relation for its

own safety and well-being (“Ekphrasis” 696-700).

Giving the priority to the visual, Mitchell, then, proclaims that ekphrastic experience

occurs in two stages. The first is the stage where “the conversion of the visual

representation into verbal representation” takes place (Picture 164). In this meeting

level, the verbal regards the visual inferior because of its silence and stability. The

next phase is “the reconversion of the verbal representation back into the visual

object in the reception of the reader” (ibid. 164-165). According to Mitchell, this step

represents the return of superiority to the visual because the reader, already knowing

that the text is trying to represent (and replace) an image, wonders about the image

behind the text and this gesture weakens the priority of the superior text by turning it

to a simple mediator. So “every textual representation exacts some cost, in the form

of lost immediacy, presence, or truth, in the form of a gap between intention and

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realization, original and copy” and this cost results in the loss of power for the text

and a paragonal “abyss” (qtd. in Lentricchia and McLaughlin 21)75

. Besides

Mitchell, like da Vinci, argues that the image, although it is not regarded as ever-

lasting, is able to outlive a text in memory76

for it is easier to remember an image

than to recall a text unless it is learnt by heart77

. Mitchell‟s celebrated argument on

the paragonal relation between the verbal and the visual has therefore infleunced the

discourse of ekphrastic studies. The image today is not labelled as dumb, silent or

mute; rather it has special ways to communicate with its audience and the poet is a

gazer and observer as much as he is a writer (Foster and Prevallet xv; Kermode 8,

192; Verdonk “Painting” 239)78

.

Simiar to Derrida, Hollander, Heffernan, and Mitchell, more structuralist critics also

put the emphasis on the relation between the signifying systems in ekphrasis.

Eagleton states that “to be a worthy structuralist, it must be conceived that not only

the signifier but the relation between other signifiers” is essential (118)79

. Because

poetry is “made of words: conventional, instrumental signs” and because “these signs

are organized into complex patterns of various sorts… in accordance with

75 This argument on semantic and paragonal “cost” recalls Derridean understanding of ergon-parergon relation.

Poirier states that “a deconstructionist argues that when a word is used as the sign of a thing, it creates the sense

of the thing‟s absence more than of its presence. This means… that the word is not the thing it represents.

Language, so the argument goes, can create an abyss… and writing is constructed on that abyss” (149). 76 It may be useful here to remember the story of Moneta, goddess of memory in Greek mythology. As the sole

divine survivor of the Saturnian age and as the mother of the Muses (and the mother of all arts by the same

token), Moneta represents imagination. According to Kermode, it is because of Moneta‟s interest in the image,

that image has an outlasting place in memory (12). Referring to the great body of lyrics composed on the image

of a lady, Kermode whimsically states that “Moneta‟s face haunts many poets” (ibid. 30). 77 It is necessary to remember that memorizing texts are usually achieved by memorising of succeeding images

since it is easier to remember images (Hughes). See Hughes for further details on memorising techniques. 78 Kermode, for instance, like Mitchell, gives the palms to images because he thinks that they are more successful

in representing action (55). 79 Similar emphasis on the importance of the relation between signifying systems was also put forward by A. J.

Greimas (in Uçan 45), Riffaterre (Semiotics 22, 45), Wimsatt and Beardsley (in Davies 118), Leach (311), and

Davies (35, 75-76).

103

grammatical, rhetorical, logical, psychological or dramatic principles” poetry, as a

form of discourse, attracts the attention of such critics (Brooks and Warren xxxiii).

This is maybe the reason behind the tendency of those stylisticians, linguists, and

structuralists, who are more inclined to analize the textual and structural in texts, to

deal with ekphrasis as a discourse and a rivalry on the grounds of signifying systems.

Although Halliday believes that “any work of literature can be analysed with

linguistics” (302), it is Stylistics, as an established field today, that provides a better

perspective for an analysis of ekphrastic poetry. As it has been explained earlier, due

to its scientific (linguistic) terminology and holistic perspective, stylistic examination

is closer to ending up in more accurate and literary analysis rather than superficial

commentaries (Fowler “The New” 15; Ulu “Understanding” 11-13; Freeman 21).

Besides Stylisticians have been interested in ekphrasis, sister arts, and image-word

relations, and the paragonal relationship more than other structuralists and linguists.

Style of a text reveals the metalinguistic aspects of these signifying systems

“superimposed” within the system and thus this saves style from being a mere

supplement to literary analysis (Talbot J. Taylor 45). Within the light of the previous

critical ideas, Verdonk argues that Stylistics, as an “interdisciplinary study of how

readers process literary texts, or perhaps better still, „of what happens when a reader

reads a literary texts‟,” provides an interconnection between the study of the image

and the text (“Painting” 235; Stockwell 5)80

. An important contribution of Verdonk

80 Here and elsewhere, by “Stylistics,” Verdonk means Cognitive Stylistics, a term initiated by him referring to

the understanding of literary texts through cognitive linguistics and literary analysis. Verdonk states that

Cognitive Stylistics, which aims to bring a “fresh inspiration” to Linguistics, opposes the Chomskian notion that

104

related to this notion is his argument on the transformation of the image. He believes

that in ekphrastic poetry, images are transformed into words and these words are then

transformed into images to be perceived in mind. This process is inevitable because

it is in the human nature to think in images and group these images to make up a

meaningful whole:

It is a well-known fact that humans are invariably charmed by linguistic

quirks involving patterned structures of repetition. Most interestingly,

cognitive linguists claim that our innate habit to structure things into

symmetrical patterns, including patterns of repetition, is in fact a

projection of our embodied understanding of symmetry in the world

around us (Verdonk “Painting” 238).

Within the transfer of the image into word and the word into image, an

interconnected shift takes place. This correlation, various aspects of which have been

presented previously, is the central for ekphrasis. According to Verdonk:

Now, a representation implies not only that it represents something but

also that it represents this something to someone. Therefore, it may be

said that an ekphrastic poem embodies a communicative triangle between

the artist, the poet‟s persona, and the reader. In other words, it is very

much a discourse, which I define as an interpersonal and context-bound

act of communication verbalized in a text, and waiting to be inferred

from (“Painting” 236-7)81

.

Hence Verdonk believes that it is the job of a stylistician to study this

communication. Considering the “indefinite, undetermined, unstable and indeed

language is a separate cognitive faculty and argues that language is an intrinsic quality of human brain based on

experiments (“Painting” 235). 81 Emphasis added.

105

often unsettling” reading each individual, this process could be hard but would

produce a more complete analysis (ibid. 237).

Similarly, Davies believes that ekphrasis is a complex exercise for it involves

looking at a picture, conceiving the image, processing it in mind, and creating a new

text out of the processed image respectively. Correspondingly, he regards ekphrasis

as a process of succeeding transformations from a concrete visual image to the

mental image; from the mental image to text; and from text to mental image again

(74). With its complicated course, hence, ekphrasis requires a close cognitive

inspection:

How do we recognize what pictures represent? It is likely we do so by

using the same perceptual and cognitive modules and processes that

govern the recognition of their actual subject. We are evolved visually to

identify items in our own environment. When we do so, our brains

“interpret” an image reflected on the curved surface of the retina into a

visual representation of a three-dimensional world populated with

objects. And we are evolved visually to re-identify items in our

environment, though they are presented to us at different times from

different perspectives, either continuously as we move with respect to

them, or at temporally separated moments … We see the picture‟s

subject in the painting because the painting presents a visual aspect

recognized as of the subject on the basis of its resemblance to that subject

(Davies 171-172).

Consequently, as Verdonk, Davies, and the theorists mentioned earlier demonstrate,

ekphrasis has become an intricate term in the twentieth century rather than a

rhetorical device simply defined as detailed description. This change, which is going

to be explained in the next section and exemplified in the following chapters, has

made ekphrasis an essential literary device practiced by remarkable poets.

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Subsequently, it should be kept in mind that the study of ekphrasis and the ekphrastic

tradition itself owe much to the notable assumptions and scholarly contributions

presented above had been made.

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2.5. “Ce n’est avec des Idées… C’est avec des Mots82:”

Ekphrasis, Ekphrastic Tradition, Stylistics, and Theorems

The introductory chapter and sections presented above in this chapter are intended to

introduce a selection from the mainstream arguments that have dominated the literary

and philosophical discussions on ekphrasis. As this survey has shown, some of the

ideas are rather established and have been taken for granted throughout the study

while some others have been occasionally appraised, interpreted or judged for their

theoretical shortcomings or functionality. The final part of this chapter aims to

develop new perspectives, assumptions and classifications that will be referred to in

the analysis sections. Furthermore, the following arguments are also intended to

contribute to the recently popular confrontations on ekphrasis.

In order to understand the ekphrastic tadition clearly, the philosophical, chiefly

ontological, aspects of ekphrasis should be covered first. The paragonal relationship

between the visual and verbal introduced above is a good starting point to interpret

the ekphrastic relations and tradition because the ontological rivalry between the two

media form the core of the visual-verbal struggle, whether it is called paragonal,

pictorial turn, or enargeia. It is common practice to consider the end product, the

ekphrastic poem, as far as this study is concerned, while exercising literary

criticism83

. In Derridean terms, the source, or the visual artwork, becomes a

82 The quotation is from a dialogue between the painter Edgar Degas and Stéphane Mallarmé (based on Paul

Valéry‟s account in his Degas, Danse, Dessin [Paris, 1946]). One day Degas comes and says to Mallarmé that he

wants to write poetry and has many ideas in his mind but mourns that, no matter how hard he has tried, he has

been unable to compose any poetry. Mallarmé‟s replies “Mais Degas, ce n‟est point avec des idées que l‟on fait

des vers… C‟est avec des mots” (“But Degas, poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words”

[Translation mine]) (qtd. in Yavuz 203). 83 Nietzche criticises Kant for his emphasis on the audience when he says “Kant, like all philosophers, instead of

envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful

purely from that of the „spectator‟…” (Genealogy of Morals 3d diss. Sec.6). However, this study, as it has been

108

supplement to which the poem is naturally tied to. The supplement is actually a

“dangerous supplement,” as Derrida and Heffernan call it, since the ekphrastic poem

would not be an ekphrastic poem without it (The Truth 54-55; Heffernan 22-23). The

visual, or rather the idea of the visual (the idea that urges the text to represent),

hence, dominates the text in secret leading the poem to depict the image. Then, a text

based on the absent image is created though the dominance of the image seems to

dictate. Nevertheless, it is clear that, above all external elements (parergon), the

verbal is powerful to depict, direct, and represent the image in the way it (and the

poet) wants (ergon). Considering the ontological questions and ascendancy problems

of ekphrasis, it is possible to conclude within the framework of a painting, the visual

is more successful in representing and relating the artistic message the artist intends

to present. The visual artwork, using the easily adoptable visual images, dominates

the canvas and attracts its audience. However, considering the elements external to

the internal image locked within the canvas, the poetic line seems to succeed the

image albeit through the arbitrary and fabricated signs of the written language. What

happens in an ekphrastic poem is, therefore, the communication between these two

different sign systems.

Metaphorically speaking, the image (and the painter) communicates with the poet

through special ways. Although it has been symbolically labelled “mute” in its

history, the visual is able to murmur to its audience if not able to speak as presented

in Mitchell‟s arguments above. It is probably for this reason giving a map to a friend

who is trying to find a place is usually more efficient than telling him how to go

pointed out a number of times, does not simply focus on the poem (end product) but also on the other interrelated

factors such as artworks, history, and literary criticism.

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there. Because human mind works with images and the written language requires the

transposition of its arbitrary signs to be reshaped as natural signs in the brain while

the natural images are conceived as already processed and cultivated as observed in

the arguments of Verdonk and Mitchell. However, as it is going to be presented in

the last chapter of this study, the shift of the image from the paragonal repression of

the word to the visual-centred world in the twentieth century, or what Mitchell calls

pictorial turn, is not finalised. Although the image, after a long period of pacified

state, becomes at the centre of artistic expression as it has never been before, it would

be unfair to think that the image dominates the verbal at the present, as Mitchell

argues; therefore, maintaining the “war” metaphor between the sister arts, the result

is a tie rather than victory and/or defeat. There are two reasons for this: first, as it is

going to be exemplified in the ekphrastic poetry of the twentieth century, the visual

hardly intends to surpass the verbal; secondly, and more importantly, the visual and

the verbal co-work on every level instead of trying to dominate one another. It is as if

they have realised the fact that they are inter-dependent and need to rely on one

another within the artistic norms of the twentieth century. So modern ekphrasis is

hardly a total pictorial turn or a paragonal battle84

. Considering the calm, “sisterly,”

and co-opretaive relation between the two arts, modern ekphrastic exercises could be

labelled as deparagonal; undoing what they have been doing so far.

Connected to the deparagonal notion, if the curtain before these metaphorical

utterances are unveiled and “talky poem” is regarded as a “poem” in the sense it is

really understood (Hollander 6), a different phenomenon is revealed. Obviously a

84 See Chapter IV for details.

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poem cannot talk or articulate itself unlike a painting which can present itself at once

at the moment of being gazed at. In other words, a poem needs an activity, a process

of being read in order to exist, and in the case of an ekphrastic poem, in order to

represent the visual artwork that it is about. In this case, ekphrastic poem could be

regarded as inactive or dead and this dead ekphrasis can only be vitalized through a

reader just as a painting is labelled as “silent” and “mute” because of their veiled

status. The term dead ekphrasis, therefore, refers to the weakness of the verbal text

which needs to be processed after its production unlike the image which can at once

be viewed and conceived. For the painting, however, the paragonal situation is more

demanding. Because the verbal is able to trap the visual by using the arbitrary signs

of the language, the visual medium mey be forced to maintain its stability as in the

emblem poems such as George Herbert‟s “Easter Wings.” In the case of notional

ekphrasis, dead ekphrasis is usually at work because the visual medium is fictional

and already pacified. Consequently, ekphrasis, as a phenomenon, occurs between the

dense inter-relation of dead ekphrasis, the textual recession, and ergon, the textual

dominance outside the canvas85

.

At this point, the distinction between notional and actual ekphrases that Hollander

has introduced becomes less functional because it is the idea of the image that

dominates the text, not the visual itself. Whether the source is real or imaginary has

85 Similar visual-verbal power relations are also found in exlibris, which aims to represent the content or the

owner of a book in a stylishly designed way. The problem in exlibris is also one of dominance and property

because it occurs within the book, in the exergue (literally referring to the small space below the main device in

numismatics; here it is usually on the other side of the hard cover or on the initial page of the book), and is about

the book. With its own artistic qualities, exlibris threatens the unity of the book, always trying to dominate the

book as another ontological entity or “dangerous supplement.” Foucault comments on Derrida‟s emphasis on the

importance of exergue when he talks about the symbolic imposition of power of the state through monetary

affairs. He states that the old tradition to press the king‟s head on the coins serves both as an aide-mémoire

emphasizing the unquestionable power of the king each time one holds or looks at it and as a means of possession

(Power 54). The image is on the coins because they are valuable and the public (or the subjects) need it (ibid. 54-

55). See Derrida‟s Archive Fever for more details on the exergue (/eks' [:] erg/) problem.

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little importance because the produced poem is already dependent on abstraction. In

other words, Keats‟s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is an ekphrastic poem notwithstanding

the existence of the urn and it would remain an ekphrastic poem if the subsistence of

such an urn was proved86

. Nonetheless, Peter Verdonk‟s comment on this issue is

rather decisive and plausible. Commenting on Henry Widdowson‟s argument against

the usefulness of Hollander‟s distinction between notional ekphrasis and actual

ekphrasis, Verdonk states that

My response to this query is that when I say that Hollander‟s distinction

between actual and notional ekphrasis might be useful, I am only

thinking of ekphrasis from an art-historical point of view. So I entirely

agree with him that the distinction is of little use to a stylistical or

rhetorical analysis of an ekphrastic poem (“Painting” 242)87

.

This remark is quite logical because it is hard to ignore Hollander‟s categorization

totally because an art historian or an art critic will definitely feel the need to take

notice of the represented artwork. It should also be remembered that if a particular

poem is noticeably composed about a particular existing work of visual art then that

work of art should be taken into consideration while commenting on the poem.

Otherwise, criticisizing the poem without having seen the painting or sculpture

86 The above presented relation has a pragmatic result. It illustrates the need of the verbal to rely on the visual as

far as the text is to be called ekphrastic. However, looking at the issue other way round would result in

metaphorical outcomes, rather than functional. If the poem is thought to be the supplement of the visual regarding

that the visual needs the existence of the verbal in order to survive, at least symbolically, then the poem becomes

a gateway for the image to represent itself in a totally different, more communicative and probably more

longlasting way. To put it another way, the poem figuratively becomes the distributor of the silent image. 87 It is interesting to note that Verdonk has somewhat softened his claim in his e-mail addressed to me by saying

“you need this distinction if you wish to analyse a poem that addresses a work of art which is purely fictional”

(Verdonk).

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would be pointless and non-academic88

. It is because of this reason this study

presents a list of figures that the poems use as source of inspiration.

The second essential point to clarify is the place and limits of ekphrasis in literary

studies and criticism. As it is clear from the presented survey, ekphrasis is an

established literary tradition. From a rhetorical and descriptive method, ekphrasis has

irrecoverably become a poetic term and trans-textual device mediating between two

different signifying systems; one using lines and colours and the other, as in

Mallarmé‟s words given in the title of this section, words. Although “there is no such

thing as a „literary language;‟ that is to say, there are no items of modern English

vocabulary or grammar that are inherently and exclusively literary,” the poet uses his

medium in such a way that it is clearly differentiated from ordinary language

(Simpson 7)89

. Davies, for instance, argues that it is always harder to categorize

poetry because it has a special mode to deal with words (95). For ekphrastic poetry,

therefore, it is unjust to claim that it is simply the description of visual works of art.

Returning to the definition presented in the introductory chapter, ekphrasis should be

called the artistic verbal representation of visual works of art.

Another fundamental point about the ekphrastic tradition is the shift it has

experienced in the nineteenth century. It is surprising to note that only two of the

theorists who study ekphrasis (Hollander and Heffernan) have mentioned this

88 Some critics, especially those with Linguistics origins, totally ignore or pass little notice of the paintings that

the ekphrastic poems refer to. Verdonk, for instance, while analyzing Williams‟s “The Dance,” does not feel the

need to refer to Brueghel‟s painting and although it is a thorough study, the absence of the painting in his article

weakens his points (“Painting” 238-240). 89 Original emphasis.

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development in the tradition but this point, which could be regarded as a milestone in

the history of ekphrasis, should be scrutinized and explicated in detail.

It is known that beginning from the Renaissance, there has been a “boom” in the

number of images in the conceptual world of man (Crary 13). Discoveries followed

by secientific, social and economic developments brought about a new understanding

of the world, which required a new imagery and terminology, and the need became

more pressing after the expansion of industry throughout the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. The man, in the midst of this abyys urged by successive

developments and change, began to turn from a down-to-earth, not-too-many-sided

creature into an individual and this was accompanied by his change from humble

seer to gazer and observer, whose “ observing eye cannot be still” (Spiegelman 4).

Foucault, commenting on this change of perception, states that this was the time the

simplistic and passive subject was replaced by the active and observing spectator

(Power 151; Order 96)90

. Similarly Crary terms this development as the reproduction

of the observer (18, 23-24). He seeks the reasons of this change in the invention and

development of photographic devices of perspective. Camera obscura, for instance,

which had commonly been used by painters and scientists in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries to perceive the visuality of images, became the camera in the

nineteenth century (Crary 15, 24, 45)91

. The camera in the nineteenth century,

90 Similar observations have been made by Berger but for him this change has began much earlier, in the

seventeenth century (16-24). 91 Camera obscura was a device that provided the accurate image of objects by way of the mirrors inside a box.

The device was used by painters, especially Flemish painters of the seventeenth century, to produce copies of

images of objects (Crary 45). Vermeer, for instance, used it to produce the light-shadow effect in his depictions of

interiors (ibid. 47). Among other devices used by painters are stereoscope, kaleidoscope, zootrophe,

fenacitiscope, and stereograph. These devices were used in theatres for phantasmagoric (ghost) effects (Crray

123-138; 148). Foucault also talks about camera obscura as a metaphor of the panoptican system the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries superimposed (Discipline 217).

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followed by the introduction of film making in the twentieth century, enabled the

production of verisimilitude, copies and reproductions (of paintings, images, objects

and so on) “were everywhere”(ibid. 24-25, 26).

While Crary puts the emphasis on the technical developments concerning the act of

seeing, critics like Berger focus on the ideological background of the issue. For

Berger, the act of seeing and depicting the gazed object was shaped by the capitalist

ideology (45). Particularly after the industrial revolution, painters were patronized by

the middle class who dominated the industrial and monetary affairs especially in

England. These patrons either hired painters to paint them or collected artworks as a

sign of prosperity (Yavuz 396-71). Finally, the artwork was turned into a commodity,

bought and sold, as well as a symbol of the wealthy which yet resulted in a gradual

increase in the number of imagery, reproduced artworks, and replicas92

. For Walter

Benjamin, as people wanted to possess in the nineteenth century, reproduction grew

ever more and the result was a great number of copies (Yavuz 370)93

. This tendency

still continues in the present. In Heffernan‟s words:

...in our age, the age of the museum, works of art have become

commodities bought, traded, stolen, or acquired under conditions not

always wholly distinguishable from robbery or fraud… And if the work

of art has become a commodity, it can never be wholly detached from the

reproductions through which we so often experience it (Museum 154)94

.

92 In this respect, Mitchell‟s term “pictorial turn” could have dated back to the late eighteenth century. Berger,

like Mitchell, believes that picture has occupied the dominant side in the last two centuries (albeit his focus is on

the twentieth century like Mitchell) and to illustrate this point some of the sections are solely made of images,

which can represent themselves as communicative entries (35-45, 65-83, 113-128). 93 It is essential to note that the replicas and copies also added to the value and originality of the artworks. This

point is also mentioned by Benjamin (Yavuz 371) and Berger (12, 70). 94 At this point, Heffernan echoes Derrida‟s “dangerous supplement,” which has been explained earlier.

Commenting on art as commodity, Landow states that until the nineteenth century, paintings were bought and

sold by the guilds, nobility, upper-middle class, and aristocracy as a valuable currency (2). However, he also adds

that it is in the nineteenth century that the value of paintings was doubled and became unaffordibly expensive

(ibid. 2-3).

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Heffernan, by regarding the present age as the “age of the museum,” also comments

on the opening of museums, a more critical development concerning the ekphrastic

tradition. Although Heffernan argument, like Hollander‟s previously covered ideas,

does not focus on the opening of museums as a critical development, he accepts that

the museums play role in the in growing interest in ekphrasis especially in the

twentieth century (Museum 16-24; “Entering” 262-263).

Although the idea of museum dates back to the art collectors in the fourteenth

century, the museum, as an institution and as it is understood in the modern sense,

was a late sixteenth-century notion. Due to the Renaissance tendency to revisit

ancient works of art, Italy, where this tendency had appeared first, witnessed the

opening of first institutional museums such as the Uffizi Gallery (Alexander and

Alexander 23-26). Following the essential opening of museums such as Belvedere

Palace (Vienna), Museo Sacro (Vatican), and Musée des Beaux-Arts et

d'Archéologie (Besançon), England saw the opening of British Museum in 1753 and

then the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, both of which had been established by the

order of King George III (ibid. 58-59). Added to the personal interest of the king in

art objects, the contributions of Sir Hans Sloane, J.M.W. Turner, and Lord Thomas

Bruce (commonly known as Lord Elgin) resulted in the establishment of these

museums. Sir Sloane, as a wealthy landlord and art collector, donated all his

collections of antiques for the opening of the British Museum while J.M.T. Turner,

the well-known painter of the time, exhibited and donated about two hundred

paintings for the Royal Academy (Landow 4). Lord Elgin, who had travelled widely

in Greece, Anatolia, and Italy, contributed the sculptures and marbles to the Royal

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Academy. These marbles, referred to as “Elgin marbles” today, are regarded as the

beginning of a preservation and collection process in museums in England (ibid. 60;

Heffernan 24; Hollander 50). In time, these museums began to gather all valuable art

objects together, especially paintings and plastic artworks. On the surface, the result

was a change of place for these artworks. However, this development turned out to

be the end for the idea that the artworks, due to their textures and structures, were

perishable95

. Besides, as opposed to the previous habit to visit private collections to

see paintings, museums drew poets, who then became “gazers” themselves, to show

and inspire as they became a site of attraction at length. The astonishing number of

poems composed in museums especially in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first

centuries is, thus, a result of the briefly explained historical development.

There is one more central topic related to the historical and contextual background of

paintings, the act of seeing and gazer‟s perspective which has been overlooked by the

critics of ekphrastic poetry96

. As it is going to be explained and detailed in the

following survey of ekphrasis in the next chapters, the general scheme of the

tradition shows that a conscious interest in ekphrasis is observed in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, first in the works of Blake, Wordsworth,

Keats and Shelley and then in the works of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the latter

half of the nineteenth century. However, there is one more period during which

ekphrasis had been dominant in English literature. In the late sixteenth and early

95 See the ideas of Derrida and Hollander presented earlier in this chapter for details on this idea. 96 The only exceptions are Hollander, who clearly but briefly refers to these poems but does not concentrate on

their importance (The Gazer’s 23); Lee, who calls this convention the fashion of “learned painter” (or

“encyclopaedic painter”) in passing (44), and Heffernan (Museum 36, 41).

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seventeenth centuries, there was a growing interest in poems which may be called

painter poems. The “instructions-to-the-painter” fashion is observed in the works of

John Dryden and John Evelyn who argue that painters should be people of certain

wit and education in order to represent their subjects in a proper manner (Lee 44-45).

Painter poems, like Marvell‟s “The Last Instructions to a Painter,” “The Second

Advice to a Painter,” and “The Third Advice to a Painter” or Ben Jonson‟s “The

Picture of her Body,” share a special feature of urging painters to represent people,

places, events, or objects, in the way the poet metaphorically instructs. This interest

could be explained by the socio-economic and artistic developments in this period

when many painters came to England to seek patronage of the wealthy English lords

and camera obscura was used as a device to obtain accurate imagery by painters

(Crary 24; Berger 16).

Considering the variety of styles and the historical developments that have been

mentioned above, a subsequent idea could be argued. As it is going to be shown in

the following chapters, it is possible to divide ekphrastic tradition in English into

three stages, or phases. The first phase of ekphrasis, as it is going to be referred to,

roughly covers the tradition from the antiquity to the post-Renaissance, during which

ekphrasis preserved its primary characteristics such as the paragonal relationship and

enargeia. The second phase of ekphrasis begins with the Romantic age and continues

until the twentieth century. The third phase of ekphrasis covers the previous century

and still continues in the twenty-first century. Each of these phases, along with their

relation to one another, will be explained in detail at the end of each chapter and will

be exemplified with references to representative ekphrastic poems.

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As for the categorizations presented so far, it is ideal to stick to contextual or art

historical classification as Davidson‟s and Hollander‟s respectively. Hollander‟s

division, as it has been discussed earlier, is helpful while dealing with ekphrasis

within the limits of art criticism and art history. On the other hand, Davidson‟s

categories, “the classical painter poem” and “painterly poem,” focus not on the

painting or the painter, as opposed to their names, but on the context of ekphrastic

poems. Since it is the end-product, the poem that should be analysed critically, it is

pragmatic to consider the thematic background of the poem and not the poem‟s

relation to the existence of object d’art or its structure. However, Davidson‟s

classification may be regarded as too simplistic and clumsily-classified to cover an

essential tradition like ekphrasis. Besides, as in many other categorizations,

Davidson, too, draws the line between the two categories rather strictly. Nonetheless,

if it is art that is being dealt with, such clear-cut claims are always “dangerous and

questionable” (Pekmezci). Instead a more inclusive and tactful categorization is

possible. As it s going to be exemplified and analysed in the following chapters,

some ekphrastic poems directly refer to particular paintings by primarily describing

them as in Williams‟s “The Dance.” These poems deliberately depict what the

painter had depicted in words like superficial copies or explanatory epigrams

attached to the paintings. They, albeit with complicated poetic techniques, are

usually short lyrics or long epic narratives97

and present precise images and concrete

details often focusing on the external qualities of the artworks. Keeping in mind that

the primary function of ekphrasis inherited from the ancients is to depict or describe

the image in order to provide an accurate representation in the minds of its

97 Jameson believes that descriptive discourse is a “fetish” in epics since almost all epics are dominated by

lengthy depictions and pictorial vocabulary (165).

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audience98

; these poems could be called mimetic or descriptive ekphrastic poetry99

.

The term mimetic should not be regarded as copying a visual artwork. Because the

aim of ekphrasis is not to copy or relate but to reproduce the image, the icon, the sign

or the effect the painting provides and this reproduction or discourse is supposed to

be unique100

. Just as in the case of a musician who covers another artist‟s songs in an

original way, the parameter to judge ekphrastic poetry, therefore, should be to

consider how well, artistically, poetically, and aesthetically the source of inspiration

is produced and whether this new work has brought about a new perspective,

meaning, and novelty. Some other ekphrastic poems, on the other hand, usually

ignore or seem to ignore depictive qualities of the paintings and use them as sources

of inspiration like W.H. Auden‟s “Museé des Beaux Arts” or John Ashbery‟s

“Convex Mirror.” They meditate on the visual artwork and infrequently turn to it for

reference101

. These poems could be called meditative or inspirational ekphrastic

poems102

. Meditative poems usually focus on the image so as to philosophize on the

98 Marin, too, believes that “…the first and most immediate type of discourse produced about painting [is]…

descriptive discourse” (Sublime 29). Referring to the photographic depictions, he calls this principle “zero-

degree-landscape” (ibid. 38). Similarly, Hollander believes that “the relation of narrative and description is

central to the rhetoric of ekphrasis” (The Gazer’s 16). Besides it is useful to remember that ekphrasis itself is

defined as “the intense pictorial description of an object” (Cuddon 252). 99 A similar terminology is used by Chatman. However he refers to the word mimetic to refer to texts of

“showing” and description while calling the texts of “action” diegetic (213-214). This classification, as Chatman

himself states, could only be applied to the ekphrastic instances in epics, which contain massive depictive actions

followed by dramatic parts (ibid. 214). 100 Image could be differentiated as the interpretable visuals, such as da Vinci‟s “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre

Museum, while icon may be regarded as processed (reproduced or altered) such as the popularized and distorted

images of the original “Mona Lisa” on t-shirts, billboards, or posters. Sign, however, could be thought as a more

inclusive term, compared to image and icon because it may be visual, verbal, original, changed. Similar

definitions are found in Berger (9-10), Davies (95) and Erinç (7). 101 This does not mean that the titles or the openings of such poems ignore naming the source. On the contrary,

the majority of these poems give the title of the painting or painter‟s name within the text or in their titles. See

Appendix I for examples. 102 A similar classification is made by Marin who tries to find the “rules, constraints, and norms” of iconological

(Sublime 107). He believes that there are two levels in iconological exercises. One is the “pre-iconological level,”

in which the surface or the visible description of the painting is taken into consideration. The other, “iconological

level,” deals with the “inner meaning, intrinsic content” of artworks (ibid. 111-112). It should be mentioned that

Marin owes this idea to Peter Lamarque who had previously made a distinction between the internal (imaginative

involvement in the world of the artwork) and external (consideration of the fictionality of the world depicted in

the artwork) perspectives in the works of visual arts (Davies 136). Surprisingly, Nicolai Hartman also claims that

paintings share two spheres, real (objective) and unreal (subjective) (Erinç 40-1).

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effect the painting creates as Auden‟s retrospective comments “about suffering” in

“Museé des Beaux Arts.”

There is a fundamental point of this categorization. Unlike many of the

classifications, the mimetic-meditative distinction does not insist on a straightforward

division. It is my firm belief that an ekphrastic poem cannot be limited with these

labels; rather the poem may go in and out of these categories and may not be purely

mimetic or meditative for it may contain the characteristics of both terms such as

Williams‟s “The Adoration of the Kings” or Ashbery‟s “Self-Portrait in a Convex

Mirror.” In other words, an ekphrasric poem may both depict and philosophize, and

thus intermingle the mimetic with meditative regardless of the proposed

classification. Therefore there are no “pure boundries” in this classification as in the

majority of literary or scientific categorizations (Genette Narrative 99). The function

of this classification, as it has been pointed out earlier, is merely contextual103

. Since

it is in the nature of human cognition to classify, like any other categorization should

do, it aims to group similar poems in order to enable more precise and accurate

analysis (Hughes; Verdonk).

This chapter, along with the canonized critical ideas on ekphrasis, has presented the

theoretical background of the dissertation that is going to be referred to while

analyzing sample poems from the ekphrastic tradition. In addition to that, definitions

103 Commenting on the proposed classification, Verdonk claims that such a categorization could only be applied

occasionally and therefore a contextual-based classification should be followed. It is clear, however, that

Verdonk, who was very busy at the time, has misjudged the explanatory e-mail from me since this categorization

insists on being a contextual one (Verdonk). Pekmezci, who has produced an immense body of ekphrastic

artworks, totally agrees with the functionality of this assumption (Pekmezci). Although an e-mail asking for

evaluation and criticism has been sent to Mitchell, he has refused to evaluate this classification. Louvel, as one of

the few critics who study ekphrastic theory, has also agreed with the mimetic-meditative division by calling it a

“scholarly valuable contribution” (Louvel).

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and terminology initiated and developed throughout, such as mimetic ekphrasis,

meditative ekphrasis, deparagonal relationship, dead ekphrasis, painter poem,

ergon-parergon, and the paragonal relation, are going to be acknowledged and

reinforced with examples. Even though it was mentioned earlier in the Introduction,

it is necessary to re-emphasise a fundamental point considering the following

analyses. Parallel to Verdonk, who argues that the basic concern of Stylistics is to

look for parallelisms and repetitions (“Poems” 103), the following analyses will

particularly deal with foregrounding, repetition, parallelism, and deviation, which

provide significant clues about their parallel and/or repetitive structures. Finally, by

way of stylistic analysis, the study aims to find out about the general characteristics

of ekphrastic poetry in English and to prove the reliability of the newly introduced

terminology and categorizations and will end up with conclusive and comprehensive

remarks on the ekphrastic tradition.

CHAPTER II

The Ekphrastic Debut: Ekphrasis until the Romantics

Rilke, weary of his temporary inability to write poetry, pays a visit to his carver

friend Rodin for advice. Rodin listens to the unhappy Rilke and says: ―Why don‘t

you look at objects? Poetry, very much like painting, is made in the same way – by

looking at objects‖ (qtd. in Leisman 15). This anecdote contains clues about the

general characteristics of early ekphrastic poetry. Indeed, as it has been explained

before and seen in Rodin‘s suggestion, ekphrasis, especially before the Renaissance,

was regarded as a rhetorical device of depiction to create an accurate image of the

gazed and/or depicted object. Although it is hard to draw a strict line between

―ekphrasis as a rhetorical and functional device‖ and ―ekphrasis as an artistic and

poetic device,‖ it is clear that ekphrasis was merely used as a descriptive and

pictorial element in many larger narratives and epics especially until early

seventeenth century. Besides, since early examples of ekphrasis are basically used to

depict objects, places and events in a straightforward manner, the majority of these

examples could roughly be placed in the mimetic category of ekphrasis.

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This chapter aims to cover the ekphrastic tradition from its early examples until the

Romantic period. It also intends to find out about the general characteristics of these

examples to shade light on the analyses in the following chapters. In order to do this,

the earliest ekphrastic examples will be covered first. These examples, most of which

are epics or long narrative poems, are not going to be analysed in detail since a

stylistic analysis would take too long to apply. Besides, some of these ekphrastic

examples, particularly the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad, have been explicated in

detail by major scholars like Becker, Krieger, Francis and Heffernan. Instead, they

are going to be used to refer to the ekphrastic qualities that had been influential on

next generation of poets. Following the study of the initial examples of ekphrasis, a

section that deals with ―Ekphrasis in England‖ will follow. The next section will

focus on the tradition in England during and after the Renaissance and the

Renaissance painter poems until the Romantic poets while the last two sections will

present stylistic analyses of two representative poems, Ben Jonson‘s ―The Mind of

the Frontispiece to a Book‖ and Richard Lovelace‘s ―To My Worthy Friend Mr.

Peter Lilly: on that Excellent Picture of His Majesty, and the Duke of York, Drawne

by him at Hampton-Court‖. The analyses will continue in the following chapters with

other representative ekphrastic poetry like William Wordsworth‘s ―Elegiac Stanzas,

Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George

Beaumont,‖ John Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn,‖ P.B. Shelley‘s ―On the Medusa of

Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,‖ W.H. Auden‘s ―Museé des Beaux

Arts,‖ William Carlos Williams‘s ―The Dance,‖ Derek Mahon‘s ―The Hunt by

Night,‖ and John Ashbery‘s ―Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.‖

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3.1. Early Examples: Ekphrasis from Homer to the Renaissance

As it has been indicated earlier, the ekphrastic tradition dates back to the

progymnasmatic writings in the ancient Greece. However, as a literary device, the

initial example of ekphrasis is the description of the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad.

For many critics, Homer‘s use of ekphrasis is ―a stimulus… to explore the

differences between visual and verbal‖ (Becker 9). The description of the shield,

which lasts about one-hundred-and-thirty lines, is like a painting fixed in space. Of

course, the Shield of Achilles is not the only ekphrastic instance in the epic; there are

other detailed and lengthy descriptions of objects and events1. But it is true that the

shield has been the primary example which contains both the guidelines and the

borderlines of ekphrasis because, in Becker‘s words, ―the Shield of Achilles is the

most magnificent work of art described in the Iliad‖ (77).

Apart from being the initial ekphrastic piece, the Shield of Achilles is also unique

because few other works of art have been elaborated both in the Iliad (apart from teh

description of Agamemnon‘s armour, which serves as a preparatory scene for the

shield)2 and elsewhere in the history of literature. Instead of reminding us of its

functionality and strength as the describer, Homer pulls out and presents another

story out of a simple armour that could just be given in-between the lines. However,

1 Some of the other ekphrastic examples in the Iliad occur in 7.219-24; 10.260-71, 439-41; 11.36-37; 12.294-8;

13.21-6; 14.178-80, 214-8; 18.369-71, 373-81, 389-90, 400-2; 23.740-9. Among these examples, especially the

Shield of Hercules, the Sceptre and the Shield of Agamemnon (which focuses on the horrifying image of the

Gorgons), the Tapestry of Helen (which is the first representational piece of art described in the Iliad), the Bow of

Pandarus; the Chariot of Hera, Aegis [the robe] of Athena, the Cup of Nestor, and the Arms of Agamemnon could

be regarded as essential ekphrastic depictions. 2 Even in the section where Agamemnon‘s arms are described, Agamemnon himself is the subject of description

as opposed to the narration of the shiled where Homer focuses on the object.

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it is true that the shield is not simply a metal device of protection, it is a ―great and

sturdy shield… elaborately crafted… and brighter than blazing fire‖ (722; 741-742).

The description of the shield has been a model for ekphrastic exercises especially

until the Pre-Raphaelites. Homer does not merely relate the physical appearance of

the object. In fact, considering its appearance, Homer only tells us that it is round,

made of bronze, tin, gold, and silver, and it has five layers encircling one another.

Instead, he presents us a narration ornamented with personified abstractions,

anecdotes, and astrological signs. Basically, there are eleven parts of this narration.

From the beginning of the production phase, Homer first relates us Hephaestus

hammering the astrological designs and then the story of two cities crafted on the

shield – one is of peace and prosperity and the other is of war and strife. Next, he

depicts Hephaestus designing a well-ploughed farmland, a landed estate, a cornfield,

a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a ―lovely valley bottom‖ (719), a dance floor, and finally

the ―Ocean‖ (738) on the shield. However, more than Hephaestus making the shield,

Homer describes the inside story of each of these physically mute and stable items on

the shield. In other words, foregrounding the details of each set of images, he

animates the described events and people and eventually the totality of the silent

metal shield.

Homer‘s animated story of the shield begins with the story of the two cities. The first

of these cities enjoy feasts, wedding ceremonies, dances and music. Then a dispute

on ―the blood-money owed for a murdered man‖ takes place, which is soon taken to

elders to decide (617). The other city, on the other hand, is described under the siege

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of two armies. As the surrounding soldiers are discussing whether to attack or to

demand ―half of all the goods / contained in that fair town‖ (634-635). Meanwhile

the inhabitants of the besieged city plan to lay an ambush and kill the flocks of the

surrounding armies hoping that a shortage of food would force the siege to be

postponed:

When the soldiers reached a spot which seemed all right

for ambush, a place beside a river where the cattle

came to drink, they stopped there, covered in shining bronze.

Two scouts were stationed some distance from that army,

waiting to catch sight of sheep and short-horned cattle.

These soon appeared, followed by two herdsmen

playing their flutes and not anticipating any danger.

But those lying in ambush saw them and rushed out,

quickly cutting off the herds of cattle and fine flocks

of white-fleeced sheep, killing the herdsmen with them.

When the besiegers sitting in their meeting place

heard the great commotion coming from the cattle,

they quickly climbed up behind their prancing horses

and set out. They soon caught up with those attackers.

Then they organized themselves for battle and fought

along the river banks, men hitting one another

with bronze-tipped spears. Strife and Confusion joined the fight,

along with cruel Death, who seized one wounded man

while still alive and then another man without a wound,

while pulling the feet of one more corpse out from the fight.

The clothes Death wore around her shoulders were dyed red

with human blood. They even joined the slaughter

as living mortals, fighting there and hauling off

the bodies of dead men which each of them had killed.

(630-666).

The chaotic atmosphere of the second city is contrasted first with the ―fertile

spacious farmland‖ and then the happy landed estate of an ancient king. In the latter

picture, the harvesters of the estate are depicted busy reaping corn while binders tie

up the crop with straw as their kings stands some distance away with ―a sceptre in his

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hand / …saying nothing, but with pleasure / in his heart‖ (684-686). Then Homer

portrays a vineyard where grape pickers gather to harvest the field and young girls

carry baskets full of grapes. The narration gets more and more energetic as he

describes the story of the herdsmen herding their cattle:

Then he [Hephaestus] set on the shield a herd of straight-horned cattle,

with cows crafted out of gold and tin. They were lowing

as they hurried out from farm to pasture land,

beside a rippling river lined with waving reeds.

The herdsmen walking by the cattle, four of them,

were also made of gold. Nine swift-footed dogs

ran on behind. But there, at the front of the herd,

two fearful lions had seized a bellowing bull.

They were dragging him off, as he roared aloud.

The dogs and young men were chasing after them.

The lions, after ripping open the great ox's hide,

were gorging on its entrails, on its black blood,

as herdsmen kept trying in vain to chase them off,

setting their swift dogs on them. But, fearing the lions,

the dogs kept turning back before they nipped them,

and stood there barking, close by but out of reach.

(702-717).

Once again, Homer contrasts the chase scene with the happy valley and then ―an

elaborately crafted dancing floor‖ that follows it (722). The dance floor is full of girls

and boys all of whom are ornately dressed and are dancing after ―two acrobats led on

the dance / springing, and whirling, and tumbling‖ (737-738). At length, Hephaestus

adds the Ocean (probably the Mediterranean) to finalize the making of the shield3.

3 It is hard to imagine such a complex web of images crafted on a shield that contains stories of marriage,

litigation, ploughing, sheep-herding, cattle-driving, grape-harvesting, festivals, dancing, singing, and acrobatics.

However, there have been attempts to formulate Homer‘s depiction both on paper and in reality. See Illustartion

I.ii., an anonymous engraving from the eighteenth century, and Illustration I.iii., John Flaxman‘s reproduction of

the shield which has inspired well-known interpretations of the shield like Angelo Monticelli‘s. In Plato‘s

understanding of mimesis, these works would be mimesis of misesis of yet another mimesis.

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As seen on, rather than describing the shield merely as a means of war craft, Homer

dramatizes the silent images on the shield and tells an uninterrupted story almost as

theatrical as the story of the Trojan War itself. However, it is unnecessary to give the

details of each story and description because the important point in Homer‘s

ekphrastic example is his vigorous diction, lively depictions, and style. Indeed, what

makes the account of the shield unique is his skill to present a silent work of art in

such a powerful way that could energize and give life to the figures on the shield.

Lessing, who believes that the magnificence of the shield as a work of art depends on

the detailed description and narration of events, claims that ―I find that Homer

represents nothing but progressive actions‖ (79). As one of Lessing‘s first essential

observations about the Shield of Achilles, this statement holds true. In Homer‘s

description of the story of the shield, there is a distinctly active diction. Out of the

twenty-seven verbs he uses for Hephaestus, only two of them indicate state,

possession or passivity4 while the rest of the verbs are all verbs of action like

―make,‖ ―create,‖ and ―set.‖ The majority of the ekphrasized shield, however, does

not feature the lame god Hephaestus but other subjects like kings, girls, boys,

harvesters, and herdsmen. These sections form the stylistic parallelism between the

two parts because only ten of the one-hundred-and-forty-five verbs indicate state or

immobility. The remaining one-hundred-and-thirty-five verbs are verbs that indicate

physical activity like ―dance,‖ ―turn,‖ ―dispute,‖ ―cheer,‖ ―rush out,‖ ―pick,‖ ―carry

off,‖ and so on. In addition to the mobility these verbs provide, it should be noted

that verbs phrases like ―loud music / of the bridal song,‖ ―young lads dancing,‖

4 By the phrase ―indicating state, possession, or passivity,‖ I mean the verbs ―be,‖ ―have,‖ or the passive case of

the verbs of action like ―it was made.‖

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―constant tunes of flutes and lyres,‖ ―two men were arguing about blood-money,‖

soldiers ―discussing two alternatives‖ on how to attack the besieged city, ―two

herdsmen / playing their flutes,‖ ―when the besiegers… / heard the great commotion

coming from the cattle… / [and] prancing horses,‖ ―barking dogs,‖ and ―a boy with a

clear-toned lyre / played pleasant music, singing the Song of Lions in his delicate

fine voice. His comrades kept time, / beating the ground behind him, singing and

dancing‖ add much to the energetic aura of the text with a clearly foregrounded sense

of hearing. The stylistic exercise Homer uses to give voice to the silent image and to

turn the readers into listeners through phonological uses has been applied greatly in

centuries to come.

There is another level of parallelism that needs attention. Successive phases of action

and the direct use of speech acts created by the use progressive verbs are further

supported with the use of gerunds and continuous tenses. Apart from the introductory

statements like ―Next, Hephauestus placed on that shield a vineyard‖ (690) or ―On

that shield, Hephaestus then depicted Ocean‖ (738), the narrated stories are presented

in gerunds or past continuous tense as in the following lines:

...By the light

of blazing torches, people were leading the brides

out from their homes and through the town to loud

music of the bridal song.

There were young lads dancing,

whirling to the constant tunes of flutes and lyres,

while all the women stood beside their doors, staring

in admiration.

(608-614)5

5 Emphasis added.

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or in these lines:

Then he set on the shield a herd of straight-horned cattle,

with cows crafted out of gold and tin. They were lowing

as they hurried out from farm to pasture land,

beside a rippling river lined with waving reeds.

The herdsmen walking by the cattle

…

But there, at the front of the herd,

two fearful lions had seized a bellowing bull.

They were dragging him off, as he roared aloud.

The dogs and young men were chasing after them.

The lions, after ripping open the great ox's hide,

were gorging on its entrails, on its black blood,

as herdsmen kept trying in vain to chase them off,

setting their swift dogs on them. But, fearing the lions,

the dogs kept turning back before they nipped them,

and stood there barking, close by but out of reach.

(702-717)6

The obvious superiority of the stylistically and grammatically accusative, narrative,

and gerund-based adjectival cases over nominative and passive cases makes Homer‘s

diction exclusively dynamic. As seen on, although the narration starts in simple past

tense, parallel to the body text of the epic, the narration occupies an energetic diction

while presenting a mute and stable object. However, Homer is very tactful in keeping

the balance between depiction and narration and in keeping the analogy between

visual and verbal arts inexplicit as he clearly avoids crossing the boundaries of the

images on the shield. In the representation of the shield, none of the stories related

are complete or interpreted because they are not complete on the shield Homer is

referring to. About this uninterpreted diction, Heffernan states:

6 Emphasis added.

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Homer never explains how the meaning of the scenes is made, and no

character in the poem has anything to say about what they mean; [in the

next Book of the epic] Achilles himself simply looks at the shield with a

paradoxical combination of rage and joy (40-41).

Therefore, similar to other ekphrastic instances in the Iliad where objects are

presented as parts of larger narrative action(s), the reader-listeners are provided with

no more than the exact incidents on the shield; in Lessing‘s words ―Homer does not

paint the shield as finished and complete, but as a shield that is being made and…

[as] only one picture,‖ which makes Homer‘s narration an example of imitative

ekphrasis because the mode of representation is like a puzzle being completed (95,

99). In this sense, Homer also fulfils the basic requirement of the progymnasmatic

idea of ―describing the object for the listener‘s mind-eye.‖

The excessive use of the “–ing‖ forms along with the audibly perceptive lexis

provide more than what enargeia requires and the appearance of the object in space

in the poem; it invigorates the shield and what it represents in words. The Homeric

ekphrasis, then, contains verbal liveliness, which is embedded in a narrative history

of the object, along with a number of mimetic levels that depict the object no matter

how Homer does not mind completing the stories he relates7. In other words, while

depicting the shield down to every detail and image in a straightforward manner, he

also takes part in the stories told on the shield and describes them as if they were real

and the images were alive. This quality puts Homer‘s description of the shield

somewhere in between imitative (or mimetic) ekphrasis and meditative ekphrasis

7 Becker believes that Homeric simile (or epic simile) is the basic element of the mimetic levels in the description

of the shield. For him, Homeric ekphrasis is based on this idea in two ways: a) the narrative history of the object

b) the detailed visual description of the object (52-3).

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allowing him to both relate and comment on the images on a work of plastic – or

rather metal – art.

Homer‘s ekphrastic style was imitated in the years to come. In the 300 BC (c.a.),

Theocritus used the same dynamic way of description to describe a decorated cup in

his Idyll (35-36) while Apollonius of Rhodes, in his Argonautica, depicted the

designs embroidered Jason‘s cloak in a life-like manner in which the ram image on

the cloak talked and the bulls on the cloak were scaring people off (56, 1.764-67)8.

Although it is not a narrative about manufacturing, Hesiod‘s description of the Shield

of Hercules, which is half as long as the Shield of Achilles, resembles to Homer‘s

style in its excessive use of sounds, successive episodes and particular scenes of

events, and the focus on the object (Hollander 9; Heffernan 22). Horace‘s theoretical

support with the idea of ut pictura poesis, added to Homer‘s narration putting the

theory into practice, ekphrasis had been thought to be the ideal literary way to give

voice to the visual arts.

Other well-known early examples of ekphrasis belong to Virgil and Ovid. In many

points, Virgil‘s Aeneid and Ovid‘s Metamorphosis follow Homer‘s uninterpreted and

lively style (Heffernan 41). In both the Aeneid and Metamorphosis, objects and

events are given in such a detailed way that the epic story seems overrun by the

pictorial quality of ekphrasis. This Homeric tactic is actually an eloquent way to

produce an accurate word-picture of the represented object:

8 See the Introduction chapter and the footnotes in Heffernan (62, 201) for further examples of ekphrasis in

ancient texts.

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…when description goes beyond what is actually on the imagined surface

of the description, this is not a sign that the description is surpassing the

visual image, nor a sign of a fault in description; it is a way of describing,

whether objects or characters, within the epic (Becker 56).

The seemingly ―surpassing‖ description in the Aeneid and Metamorphosis are, as in

the Iliad, presented through objects of craftsmanship. The most representative

ekphrastic passages in these works are observed through the depiction of armours,

monuments, and tapestry and, still like Homer, Virgil and Ovid try to give life to the

silent ―visual‖ through the living ―verbal.‖

The ekphrastic instances in the Aeneid begin with Book I where Aeneas lands to

Carthage. The sculptures and paintings on the city walls of Carthage, which are still

under construction like the Shield of Achilles, relates the story of the Trojan War

(41-43). As Homer did, Virgil provides the characters in the pictures with motion

using verbs of action, gerunds, and continuous grammatical structures:

Elsewhere poor young Troilus was pictured in ill-matched combat with

Achilles… he had lost his weapons… and he was on his back trailing

from his empty chariot, but still grasping his reins, with his neck and hair

dragging over the ground, and his lance pointing back and tracing lines

in the dust. Meanwhile ladies of Troy… were seen walking in a mournful

procession… they had been beating their breasts with open hands and

they were bearing an offering of a robe to the temple of Pallas (42).

In Virgil‘s description of the pictures of the Trojan War, the readers would sense the

presence of a narrator easily as he uses passive structures in order to introduce what

the picture looked like at first sight as in ―it was pictured…,‖ ―he also recognized…

Greek chieftains,‖ ―he recognized another scene…‖ (42). This is probably the reason

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why Heffernan believes that ―after Homer, all ekphrasis becomes doubly paragonal:

a contest staged not just between the word and the image but also between one poet

and another‖ (23). Parallel to Heffernan‘s view, Lessing argues that the object was

more essential for Virgil, and this particular quality makes his ekphrasis original:

The work of art, not what it represents in it, is his model, and even if at

the same time he describes what we see represented in it, he is only

describing it as a part of [the work of art]… and not as the thing itself…

In the first case the work of the poet is original; in the second is a copy

(45)9.

Such kind of narrative seems to degrade the enargeia of the ekphrastic elements.

However, this short passage of ekphrasis is the first of lengthy epic depictions in

Virgil‘s work. Besides Virgil‘s hero, unlike Achilles, who does not respond to the

magnificence of the shield, is very much effected by the horrifying battle scenes and,

as he recalls those days, he sighs and cries (42-43).

Other than the city walls of Carthage, other ekphrastic passages also take place in the

epic as in Book 3, where two herdsmen take turns describing the wooden cups newly

carved by the divine Alcimedon (76-77), or as the story of Deadelus in Book 6.

However, probably ―…the most elaborate ekphrastic passage in the whole poem‖ is

the depiction of the Shield of Aeneas, a gift from Venus (Heffernan 30). Apart from

the fact that Homer tells the story of an unfinished shield being-made while Virgil

presents a complete armour through which ―the action comes to a standstill during

9 Krier disagrees with Lessing‘s idea that regarding the art work as it is could provide the poem a unique outlook;

for him physical distance between the observer (Aeneid) and the observed (images) results in loss of poetic

power. Krier argues that the same idea holds true for Metamorphoses (73).

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this time‖ (Lessing 95-6), there is little difference between the two depictions. Both

shields are presented in such a detailed way that readers of these passages are

immediately turned to viewers. The depictions, which often refer to ―res Italas

Romanorumque et Graecus triumphos‖ (Roman and Greek history and conquests),

follow similar grammatical and contextual patterns such as the frequent use of

elaborate adjectival structures, prophetic stories, and deliberate gaps in the

narrative10

.

In Metamorphoses, as in the Iliad and the Aeneid, there is a similar elaboration of a

work of art. However, this time the represented visual object is not a piece of

protective armour or a wall but a tapestry. Metamorphosis is a collection of didactic

stories presenting the relationship between the Roman gods and the mortals. Minerva

(Athena) is one the basic characters playing an essential role in the development of

Ovid‘s work. Book 6 opens with Minerva‘s enthusiasm to meet a girl called Arachne

after she learns about Arachne‘s weaving talent from the Muses. Minerva invites

Arachne to a weaving contest and Arachne accepts the challenge only to become

victorious with her lifelike images (6. 104-134). Ovid‘s description of Arachne‘s

tapestry takes place at this point. Arachne first weaves the story of Europa and how

she was raped by Jupiter in the form of a bull: ―so perfect was her art, it seemed a

real bull in real waves‖ (4.105-106). Then she goes on weaving other stories of

raping like Asteria, Anthiope, Isse, Erigone, Arne and Melantho, all depicting the

celestial gods deceiving mortals. Although the poem tells that all the images were

10 Heffernan thinks that all the stories related on the shields or the walls serve as Roman propaganda, first

introduced by Homer and then retold by Virgil in his own tongue (30). Besides the stories function as guides for

the heroes, especially for Aeneas, since they provide hints about the future as in the images of Augustus forcing

Egypt to surrender. For Heffernan, such fortune telling outgrows the effect of the depiction and so they language

(the verbal) becomes superior to the depicted image (the visual) (36, 41).

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―woven true to life, in proper shades‖ and that ―Minerva could not find a fleck or

flaw‖ (6.121; 129), Ovid keeps his depiction condensed. Almost all the depictions of

the tapestry are straightforward and uncomplicated images of mythological events

―…and there was Bacchus, when he was disguised as a large cluster of fictitious

grapes; deluding by that wile the beautiful Erigone;—and Saturn, as a steed, begetter

of the dual-natured Chiron‖ (6.123-126). In other words, Ovid, unlike Homer and

Virgil, avoids distracting details and vocabulary and seems to have preferred a plain

style. Besides, keeping in mind that Arachne‘s story presents important

―paradigmatic instances‖ concerning ekphrasis (Holander 12-13; Knox 68), it is clear

that neither Arachne‘s nor Ovid‘s focus is on the tapestry but on the misdeeds gods

play on men.

More important than the description of the tapestry, then, one finds the relationship

between giving voice and silencing (through rape, injustice and so on), and between

female (the weak or the helpless) and male (the manipulating gods and kings like

Apollo, Neptune, Jupiter, and Tereus). Indeed some of the authorities like Heffernan,

Hollander, and Joplin concentrate on the repressed and/or silenced female figure in

order to analyse ekphrastic poetry. Heffernan, for instance, believes that a

psychoanalytic perspective is required while considering the ekphrastic poetry

especially until the twentieth century (53)11

. However, it is basically the story of

Philomela in the fifth chapter of Book 6 in Metamorphosis, not of Arachne, that

forms the basis of such commentary. In this story, Procne, the queen of Thrace, asks

11 Apart from the stories in Metamorphoses, Heffernan often refers to two ―ancient novels‖ that contain stories of

manipulated females through rape. One of them is Longus‘s Daphnis and Chloe, which is basically a pastoral and

the other is Achilles Tatius‘s Leucippe and Clitophon, a tragic love story that ends with the death of two lovers

(Heffernan 53-59).

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his husband Tereus, the king of Thrace, to bring Philomela to Athens to meet and

talk to her. Philomela meets Tereus and bids farewell to her family. At first, the king

seems to be protecting Philomela but he is soon attracted by the beauty of the

virtuous royal lady. On the way, Tereus drags her to a lonely hut in the forest, locks

her up and rapes her. Shocked and shaken, Philomela threatens Tereus that she will

reveal all to Procne and other members of the royal family. Tereus gets furious,

pinches and cuts her tongue, and then rapes her repeatedly. When the king‘s brutality

is over, the violated Philomela comes to Athens and meets her sister. Unable to

speak, she asks for a needle and then starts weaving a complex web of images.

Through her tapestry illustrating what the king has done to her, she manages to

reveal the truth about Tereus. Ovid‘s story ends at this point and he does not mention

the contents of the tapestry. For Joplin, Philomela‘s story, which is written in blood

not in ink and words, is the most representative example that stands for the paragonal

relationship between the female and the male in ekphrastic poetry (54). Heffernan,

too, traces the signs of Philomela‘s tragic story in other stories of rape. It is

interesting to note that almost each silenced female finds a way to speak through a

visual means of art, such as weaving or painting. This is also the reason why

Heffernan assumes that all ekphrasis until the Renaissance is ―predominantly male‖

or ―masculine ekphrasis‖ (46).

Subsequently, as observed in the stories of Philomela and Arachne, weaving for Ovid

is a female attribute and an escape to express the inexpressible. Philomela, who

cannot talk, speaks through images while Arachne, who is discontented with the

brutality of the gods, voices her feelings in her tapestry and metaphorically silences

138

Minerva, who loses the challenge. It is interesting to note that the enraged goddess

punishes Arachne by tearing down her tapestry, which is also another rape-like

action belittling her rival (6.131).

Following Ovid and Virgil, one last example of ekphrasis should be mentioned

before moving on to ekphrasis in the Renaissance and how ekphrasis was received in

England. Dante‘s Divine Comedy, which contains representative examples of

ekphrastic passages, is no less ekphrastic than the Aeneid or the Iliad (Hollander

13)12

. The noteworthy ekphrastic section in Divine Comedy is the place where Dante

the traveller, guided by Virgil, is introduced to the marble bas-reliefs carved within

the threshold of the purgatorial gate in the Purgatory:

Thereon our feet had not been moved as yet,

When I perceived the embankment round about,

Which all right of ascent had interdicted,

To be of marble white, and so adorned

With sculptures…

(X.30-34).

The marble reveals the catastrophic stories about mankind and how they have been

led astray by evil as well as references to the Trojan War, which covers the rest of

Canto X. Dante‘s diction in this passage is quite similar to that of Homer‘s; the text

is stylistically parallel to the sense it evokes. Reading Canto X creates the sense that

Dante is in search of a diction that would work between stasis and momentum. As in

12 Heffernan also laments about the lack of attention paid to Divine Comedy and states that a critic needs to visit

Dante for a ―canonical genealogy of ekphrasis‖ along with Homer, Virgil, and Ovid (9).

139

the representation of the Shield of Achilles, readers do not only see, but hear and feel

the presence of the images carved in the marble:

The Angel, who came down to earth with tidings

Of peace, that had been wept for many a year,

And opened Heaven from its long interdict,

In front of us appeared so truthfully

There sculptured in a gracious attitude,

He did not seem an image that is silent.

One would have sworn that he was saying, "Ave;"…

(X.36-42).

Motion is foregrounded in such a way that every account brings about lexical energy.

Another example of such dynamic and lively presentation appears in ―another story

on the rock imposed‖ about Mars (X.52). Having heard about the Angel speaking on

the rock, the traveller also hears the oxen, the cart, and the people arguing as one

hears Homer‘s herdsmen shouting and the feud dispute on the shield. However, apart

from the sense of hearing, the sense of feeling evoked by the smoke is also worth

mentioning:

There sculptured in the self-same marble were

The cart and oxen, drawing the holy ark,

Wherefore one dreads an office not appointed.

People appeared in front, and all of them

In seven choirs divided, of two senses

Made one say "No," the other, "Yes, they sing."

Likewise unto the smoke of the frankincense,

Which there was imaged forth, the eyes and nose

Were in the yes and no discordant made.

(X.55-63).

140

Although the diction in this passage, with its use of continuous structures, gerunds,

and recurrent verbs of action, seems to follow the ekphrastic representation found in

the Shield of Achilles and the Aeneid, Dante‘s style does not simply copy and apply

Homeric and Virgilian in terms of diction. Indeed, there are two essential innovations

Dante brings about that would be used in ekphrastic exercises in the future. To begin

with, Dante takes the sense of hearing one step further; he does not only let his

listener‘s hear words and phrases but also see them conversing with one another as in

the dialogue between a villager, who seeks vengeance, and God:

The wretched woman in the midst of these

Seemed to be saying: "Give me vengeance, Lord,

For my dead son, for whom my heart is breaking."

And he to answer her: "Now wait until

I shall return." And she: "My Lord," like one

In whom grief is impatient, "shouldst thou not

Return?" And he: "Who shall be where I am

Will give it thee." And she: "Good deed of others

What boots it thee, if thou neglect thine own?"

Whence he: "Now comfort thee, for it behoves me

That I discharge my duty ere I move;

Justice so wills, and pity doth retain me."

(X.83-94).

Considering the fact that meeting silent figures converse only through indirect verbs

like ―dispute‖ (Homer XVI. 66) or ―talk‖ (Virgil 43) is a common stylistic tactic,

Dante‘s presentation of images making actual conversation is a totally new invention

and thus a sign of stylistic deviation. One may assume that the exchange of words

between the woman and God could have been already carved under the bas-reliefs as

in the carved obelisk in Shelley‘s ―Ozymandias.‖ However the expression that these

images ―seemed to be saying‖ weakens this assumption and leads one to suppose that

141

Dante, who is under the spell of the lifelike images, is making up this whole

conversation.

Secondly, Dante-the-poetic-persona, unlike the unresponsive Achilles, responds to

and talks about the marbles. No matter how Aeneid similarly responds to seeing the

scenes of the Trojan War by pouring out his tears, Dante‘s reactions are more

humane and realistic (Marianne Shapiro 99; Lessing 96). He comments on each

figure as if each carved image was a living figure and individual:

But still I wish not, Reader, thou shouldst swerve

From thy good purposes, because thou hearest

How God ordaineth that the debt be paid;

Attend not to the fashion of the torment,

Think of what follows; think that at the worst

It cannot reach beyond the mighty sentence.

…

"Master," began I, "that which I behold

Moving towards us seems to me not persons,

And what I know not, so in sight I waver."

…

O ye proud Christians! wretched, weary ones!

Who, in the vision of the mind infirm

Confidence have in your backsliding steps,

Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,

Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly

That flieth unto judgment without screen?

…

True is it, they were more or less bent down,

According as they more or less were laden;

And he who had most patience in his looks

Weeping did seem to say, "I can no more!"

(X.103-108; 112-115; 124-129; 133-136).

Both his comments (X.103 onwards and X. 124 onwards) on the atrocious images

and his conversation with his ―Master,‖ Virgil, show that the prosopopeial quality in

142

Dante‘s work is far more cognisant than Homer, Virgil, and Ovid‘s. In other words,

as readers hear Dante thinking, speaking, and commenting on the marble, which is

imaginary and ―visible parlare‖ at the same time (X.95), it is fair to attribute the

innovation that presents poetic persona deviating and taking up active role in

ekphrasis to Dante.

These ancient examples, which have usually been regarded as the ―extreme specimen

of notional ekphrasis‖ (Heffernan 14; Hollander 10) and dominated the

understanding of the ekphrasis in general until the late sixteenth century, have set the

ground rules of ekphrastic exercises. The general characteristics of these ancient

examples along with the conclusive remarks on the English ekphrastic tradition in

the Renaissance will be presented in the last section of this chapter. It is now time to

have a closer look at the ekphrastic tradition in English beginning from its early

examples to the ekphrastic poetry in the Renaissance.

143

3.2. Enter Ekphrasis: Ekphrasis in England

It is commonly agreed that the ekphrastic debut in England is attributed to Geoffrey

Chaucer like many other initial literary activities. Although Chaucer‘s depictions of

statues, temples, tapestry and artistic items are detailed verbal descriptions, they

could only roughly be called ekphrastic because his basic consideration focuses on

the narration and not on verbalizing the visual. Besides Chaucer does not seem to be

dramatizing the silent pictures as Homer and Virgil does; instead he goes for a

thorough portrayal of the object as in the embroidered pictures in The Legend of

Good Women (2358 – 63) or, the images of the Trojan War in The Book of the

Duchess (321-34), the frescoes about Aeneas in The House of Fame (151-467), or the

carved images at the Venus temple in The Parliament of Fowles (284-94)13

.

Chaucer‘s major contribution to ekphrasis, however, is found in The Canterbury

Tales (Lee 24; Heffernan 62-63). In his incomplete series of stories, Chaucer had felt

the need to depict scenes, events, and objects frequently although the major

description that could be regarded as an example of ekphrasis is found in the

Knight’s Tale (1918-2088) where he ekphrasizes on the wall-pictures at the temple of

Venus14

:

First in the temple of venus maystow se

Wroght on the wal, ful pitous to biholde,

The broken slepes, and the sikes colde,

The sacred teeris, and the waymentynge,

The firy strokes of the desirynge

That loves servantz in this lyf enduren.

…

13 Similar depictions of embroidery (within the context of Philomela‘s story) are also found in John Gower‘s

Confessio Amantis (132-474) and de Lorris and de Meun‘s Roman de la Rose. 14Parallel depictions are also made for the temples of Mars and Diana in the subsequent sections.

144

Ther venus hath hir principal dwellynge,

Was shewed on the wal in portreyynge,

With al the gardyn and the lustynesse.

(1918-1923; 1937-1939).

Commenting on these lines, Heffernan states that ―Chaucerian ekphrasis is oddly

non-pictorial‖ (62). Indeed, Chaucer‘s introduction of the temple and the Venus

statue, along with other statues, is rather direct and simplistic. In that sense,

Chaucer‘s ekphrasis remains straightforwardly mimetic because he merely describes

the inner temple with exact references to the building with an aim to create an

accurate picture for the listeners so that, by the end of the tale, each traveller would

know where each object is exactly located and see the temple:

A citole in hir right hand hadde she,

And on hir heed, ful semely for to se,

A rose gerland, fressh and wel smellynge;

Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge.

Biforn hire stood hir sone cupido;

Upon his shuldres wynges hadde he two,

And blynd he was, as it is often seene;

A bowe he bar and arwes brighte and kene.

Why sholde I noght as wel eek telle yow al

The portreiture that was upon the wal.

(1959-1968).

In short, rather than aiming ―the effect of sublimity‖ (―the presentation of something

unrepresentable‖) or the dramatic effect the visual object might create in words

(Marin Sublime 123), Chaucer goes for the realistic, unpretentious, and down-to-

earth pictorial effect that is also observable in many of his works.

145

However, more important than his uncomplicated style, Chaucer has re-introduced

the prosopopeial device following Homer and Virgil. As in the ancient epics,

Chaucer relates his tale from the mouth of a poetic persona who tries to retell the

stories told ―pleynly… [and] proprely‖ (―General Prologue‖ 727-729). Moreover,

each tale is told by a different member of the travelling pilgrims which makes

Chaucer‘s narration a story within a story. Following Chaucer, who himself follows

Homer, Virgil, and Horace, prosopopeia, or the use of a fictional persona to guide

the narration, has become an influential element in ekphrasis in English (Heffernan

22).

As it is commonly known many of the ancient works had not been discovered until

the late fifteenth century due to reasons such as the repression of the strict Roman

Catholicism and public illiteracy. Therefore, as it has been covered in the

Introduction and Chapter I, apart from Chaucer‘s efforts and some minor medieval

lyrics, little is known about ekphrasis in the Middle Ages. Following the translation

of the ancients into vernaculars, the Greek and Latin handbooks became available to

the public and the literary circles. This was followed by critical pamphlets mimicking

Greek and Latin-oriented criticism of the antiquity and then the production of more

original and national works (Graham 469).

Owing much of its influential power to the then-newly discovered ancient material,

the Renaissance brought about a new understanding of man, universe, faith and arts.

What Lessing calls the ―mania for description‖ and the idea that ―painting [or the

plastic arts in general] was still considered the nobler art‖ have been re-considered

146

within Renaissance norms (Lessing xiv; xv). Although the subjects used in ekphrasis

are frequently drawn from the ancients since the content and context of painting and

poetry were basically those of ancient epics until the late seventeenth century (Lee

40), the idea of ―immortality through art‖ shifted and the ―art‖ in this phrase turned

out to be verbal art rather than visual. According to Lee, the raise in the number of

poems (almost all following Horatian apologetic mode) entitled ―apologie for

poetrie‖ or ―defence of poesy,‖ as in Sidney‘s ―An Apologie for Poetrie‖ which

defended poetry against other art forms, shows that the art of poetry was re-

structuring itself as the more dominant and dignified form of art (33; 40)15

. More to

the point, the dominance of poetry over painting is going to become clearer in

painter poems in the following paragraphs.

The Renaissance was the time when art began to be considered as something more

than a functional and recreational act. As the artworks of antiquity such as antiques

and statues along with written works, became to be known as artistically and

historically valuable, men of literature felt the need to be more tactful while defining

art and the artistic (Erinç 33). The criticism applied to works of art, which simply

relied on intuitions before, came to depend on more philosophical and analytical

judgement (Davies 43). No matter how ekphrastic activities, and poetry in general,

was under the influence of the ancients like Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, who provided

―the best model of all‖ (Lessing 104), some alterations had been made to apply the

style of these masters to meet the needs of the time. For instance,

15 The title of Sidney‘s work varies according to its editions. The 1595 edition of Henry Olney and William

Ponsonby‘s is entitled ―An Apologie for Poetrie,‖ while in the same year another edition entitled ―An Apologie:

Poesy‖ is also known. The name has been changed much later to ―A Defense of Poesie‖ in (Robert Sidney's) the

Penshurst copy ca. 1600 (Lee 22).

147

The representation of spatial as well as figural matters in Homeric,

Virgilian or Ovidian lines becomes in the Renaissance, a question of

framing phases, parts, regions, of a description in couplets…or in

stanzas… (Hollander 16).

In terms of context, especially Elizabethan poetry focused on context and produced

―semantically significant‖ works (Haynes 238; Norbrook 147). As it is going to be

seen in Herrick‘s poem, for example, the content usually seems surpass the structure

in many of the Renaissance ekphrastic poetry though the elaborate diction of the

Elizabethan age is still present. A final remark concerning the scope and context of

poetry and the relationship between the verbal and the visual material would be to

note that, especially until late seventeenth-century, ekphrasis works other way round

as opposed to modern ekphrasis; that is it is painting that carries poetry on the canvas

albeit the number of ekphrastic poems is not small. Well-known painters of the

Renaissance like Poussin, Caravaggio, and da Vinci dedicated much of their energy

to paint the stories of ancient epics and mythological stories.

Some of the noteworthy examples of ekphrastic poetry and passages are found in

Marlowe‘s Hero and Leander (1593), in which the heroine takes a vow of chastity in

a temple decorated with images of rape (1.143-56), Sidney‘s The Countess of

Pembroke’s Arcadia: New Arcadia (1590), which provides detailed depictions of the

pastoral world of Arcadia, and Milton‘s Paradise Lost, which is decorated with

Homeric ―musical pictures‖ (Lessing 72-74)16

. Spenser, who was influenced by

Virgil and Ovid‘s dramatic and descriptive qualities to a great extent (Krier 8-18),

makes use of ekphrastic elements in Book 3 of The Faerie Qveene where the walls of

16 In Lessing and elsewhere, Milton, who suffered from loss of sight like Homer, is usually compared to Homer

for his ability to see images (Lessing 74).

148

the Castle Joyeous are adorned with tapestries depicting the story of Venus and

Adonis17

. Some of the metaphysical lyrics, sonnets, and epigrams of Marvell and

Donne like ―The Gallery,‖ ―The Picture of Little T.C in a Prospect of Flowers,‖

―Witchcraft by a Picture,‖ and ―Thy flattering picture, Phryne, is like thee, / Only in

this, that you both painted be‖ also contain ekphrastic elements.

Among the ekphrastic poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

Shakespeare‘s ―Rape of Lucrece‖ stands out with its diction and context that brings a

number of ekphrastic qualities that had been inherited from the ancients. As one of

the ―most provocative treatments of ekphrasis,‖ ―Rape of Lucrece‖ reintroduces and

reshapes the Philomela story, which it often refers to, within a different context

(Meek 390). For Hollander, the poem is

…a remarkable moment… in the series of representations of the picture

we have been given: the narrator‘s (Lucrece‘s) own representation,

recited under the demands of sympathetic – rather than erotic – desire…‖

(21).

As ―a remarkable point‖ in the history of ekphrasis in English, the story of Lucrece18

have been so influential that it has inspired and/or influenced literary milestones like

T.S. Eliot‘s ―Waste Land‖ and some other Shakespeare plays like Titus Andronicus19

and As You Like It.

17 For Heffernan both Spencer‘s The Faerie Qveene and Sidney‘s New Arcadia contain examples of ekphrasis

revealing the power relations between the gazed female and the gazer male. The women at the Castle Joyeous in

The Faerie Qveene, under the influence of the overtly erotic Venus representations, are highly seductive and raise

sexual enticement among the shepherds while Sidney‘s work, with the painting of Diana and her nymphs bathing,

Musidorus who ―peeps‖ at the painting, and the verbalized depictions of beauty, rape, silencing, and suppression,

show women consummated by male gaze (70-71). 18 Shakespeare was not the first to make use of the story of Lucrece (or Lucretia). Before him Chaucer in his The

Legend of Good Women, John Gower in his Confessio Amantis, and John Lydgate in his Fall of Princes had

referred to the story before the Renaissance. 19 Just as in the story of Lucrece, Chiron and Demetrius rape and cut Lavinia‘s tongue and hands in Titus

Andronicus (2.4.38-43). Lavinia, then, is openly likened to Lucrece for her inability to speak (4.1.61-64).

149

The story of Lucrece, like that of Philomela, is full of transgression and brutality

conducted by men. The poem, which takes place sometime in the sixth century (BC),

opens with officers telling stories after dinner at the camp outside the surrounded city

of Ardea. Collatine, one of the officers boasts about the virtues and beauty of his

wife, Lucrece, upon which Tarquin, the king‘s spoiled son, feels lust for Lucrece and

at night he secretly pays a visit to her in Collatium. Tarquin presents himself as a

friend of her husband and gains her trust. But when everyone is asleep in the manor

house, he enters Lucrece‘s room and rapes her against her pleading. The story ends

with Lucrece revealing the truth and then stabbing herself which leads to the

overthrowing of the tyrannical rule of the Tarquin family.

The ekphrastic passage in the poem takes place towards the end while Lucrece waits

for her family to come and reflects on a ―skilful painting‖ depicting scenes from the

Trojan War:

At last she calls to mind where hangs a piece

Of skilful painting, made for Priam's Troy:

Before the which is drawn the power of Greece.

For Helen's rape the city to destroy…

(1366-1370).

The depiction of the painting lasts about two hundred lines and contains references to

acts of rape, especially of Helen and Philomela. Shakespeare‘s style reminds us

Virgil‘s in that both poets occupy a clear prosopopeial mode; readers get to know the

painting from Lucrece‘s eyes as opposed to the presence of a narrator persona who

opens the poem.

150

In terms of diction, however, Shakespeare‘s work is closer to the ―oldest

masterpiece‖ of ekphrasis, the Iliad, and to Dante‘s Divine Comedy because readers

of the painting become viewers due to the highly dramatic lexical qualities (Lessing

118). This part of the poem is highly verbal containing a considerable number of

verbs of action, gerunds, and dynamic grammatical structures that invoke the sense

of seeing and hearing as in:

There pleading might you see grave Nestor stand,

As 'twere encouraging the Greeks to fight;

Making such sober action with his hand,

That it beguiled attention, charm'd the sight:

In speech, it seem'd, his beard, all silver white,

Wagg'd up and down, and from his lips did fly

Thin winding breath, which purl'd up to the sky.

(1400-1406)20

.

Rape occupies the contextual foreground as the central theme. Heffernan believes

that in terms of its power to represent the cruelty of rape, ―‗The Rape of Lucrece‘ is

unique among the works [of its time]‖ (89). However Shakespeare does not focus on

a single rape but drives his context from a number of mythological and historical

stories.

Unlike his predecessors, Shakespeare does not simply turn the painting of

a single action into story, or represent the painting as a succession of

chronologically ordered scenes. Instead he enumerates scenes in the

chronologically random order with which a viewer might pick them up

from a multitemporal canvas (Heffernan 76).

20 Emphasis added.

151

There is the rape of Lucrece, of Helen, of Philomela, as well as of the Troy, since the

poem clearly implies a sense of military rape through fear, repression, peeping,

fighting, and silencing:

... For Helen's rape the city to destroy,

Threatening cloud-kissing Ilion with annoy.

...

Many a dry drop seem'd a weeping tear,

Shed for the slaughter'd husband by the wife:

The red blood reek'd, to show the painter's strife;

And dying eyes gleam'd forth their ashy lights,

Like dying coals burnt out in tedious nights.

...

And from the towers of Troy there would appear

The very eyes of men through loop-holes thrust,

Gazing upon the Greeks with little lust:

...

In great commanders grace and majesty

You might behold, triumphing in their faces;

In youth, quick bearing and dexterity;

Pale cowards, marching on with trembling paces;

Which heartless peasants did so well resemble,

That one would swear he saw them quake and tremble.

...

The face of either cipher'd either's heart;

Their face their manners most expressly told:

In Ajax' eyes blunt rage and rigor roll'd;

But the mild glance that sly Ulysses lent

Show'd deep regard and smiling government.

(1369-1370; 1375-1380; 1383-1383; 1388-1393; 1496-1400)21

.

The implication in the above lines that war craft is an action of brutality that parts

―husband by the wife‖ and brings fear and lust in the hearts of the people under

siege. In this case, the Trojan army, the soldiers of which suffer from the terror of the

surrounding army forms the initial parallelism because it is metaphorically being

raped by ―heartless peasants‖ of the Greek army. The difference between the

21 Emphasis added.

152

adjectives used for Ajax and Ulysses indicates an essential stylistic derivation while

it also shows the emphasis on the theme of rape; while ―blunt rage and rigor‖ fills

Ajax‘s eyes as the aggravator, Ulysses is ―mild‖ and calm, nervously waiting for the

attack. More to the point, although Hecuba is the central woman in the painting,

Helen, representing the attacked city of Troy, suffers from ―rage and rigor‖ of the

Greek army. Helen‘s face, like those of Lucrece and Ulysses, is frequently compared

to the painted faces of Ajax, Nestor, and Sinon (1397, 1503). This is probably why

towards the end of the poem, Lucrece tears Sinon‘s eyes off the painting as a

revenge. In this way, she is not a pacified weaver of a tapestry but the rapist,

revenging the brutality against herself, Philomela, and Helen (Kahn 152).

The critics of ―Rape of Lucrece‖ usually concentrate on the thematic components of

the poem. But as far as the ekphrastic tradition in English is concerned another point

should be noted. Some literary critics tend to dig out the context and structure of

particular Renaissance, medieval, and ancient works to find out about ekphrastic

qualities and to label these poems as ―ekphrastic‖ and at length they can usually

come up only with limited proof. In other words, such a survey especially until the

Renaissance proves to be fruitless except for some major literary examples that have

been mentioned and/or explained in the previous sections. Indeed, it would not be

wide of the mark to call ―Rape of Lucrece‖ as the most representative and paragonal

poem by far as far as the critical discussions about the male gazer and the female

gazed are taken into consideration. The poem openly displays the paragonal rivalry

between the word and the image, and the sound and the picture.

153

At first, Lucrece, as the poem itself, seems to be favouring painting and images over

words. First time she sees the painting, she describes it as a ―skilful painting…[and

a] well-painted piece… [of] the conceited painter… [who] gave lifeless life‖ (1367;

1443; 1371; 1374). She appreciates the painting for its true-to-life style and ―the

painter‘s strife‖ to paint it (1377):

For much imaginary work was there;

Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,

…

In her the painter had anatomized

Time's ruin, beauty's wreck, and grim care's reign:

Her cheeks with chaps and wrinkles were disguised;

Of what she was no semblance did remain

(1422-1423; 1450-1453).

Praising the power of the visual and taking sides with the painting is rather

understandable because soon after the act of ravishing, Lucrece recalls the tonguless

Philomela and her words ―the eye interprets to the ear‖ which indicate the usefulness

of words as she is speechless (1325). Elsewhere in the poem, Lucrece also

remembers Philomela‘s monologues and her decision (and compulsion and/or

obligation) to break up with words and the verbal:

'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools!

Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators!

…

My sable ground of sin I will not paint,

To hide the truth of this false night's abuses;

My tongue shall utter all: mine eyes, like sluices,

As from a mountain-spring that feeds a dale,

Shall gush pure streams to purge my impure tale.'

(1016-1017; 1074-1078).

154

First Philomela curses words, which have now become an unproductive media. This

rejection is immediately followed by a substitution. As her ―eyes… shall pure

streams to purge‖ her story, the eyes replace the tongue. The tongue-eye metaphor

constructed on the ironic statement that ―[her] tongue shall utter all: [her] eyes‖ could

simply be shortened to ―[her] tongue: [her] eyes.‖ However, palm-giving to the

visual is simply an illusion and there is an unambiguous verbal turn22

towards the

end of the poem where Lucrece recognizes that her espousal of the visual was a

mistake:

On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes,

And shapes her sorrow to the beldam's woes,

Who nothing wants to answer her but cries,

And bitter words to ban her cruel foes:

The painter was no god to lend her those;

And therefore Lucrece swears he did her wrong,

To give her so much grief and not a tongue.

'Poor instrument,' quoth she,'without a sound,

I'll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue.

(1457-1465).

Neither Shakespeare nor Lucrece is content about the power of the painter.

Suspecting the reliability of the images the painter had created, therefore, Lucrece

promises to give voice to the sorrows in the painting. She believes that unless

someone turns these images into sounds, they will remain silent and dead, as in dead

ekphrasis. Finally, Lucrece re-mourns for Philomela for she had lost such a precious

ability and been forced to remain silent until the end of her life.

22 Here I am reversing Mitchell‘s term, pictorial turn, which he uses to indicate the rise of the reliability of

images especially in the second half of the twentieth century (Picture 22-30, 150-170; Iconology 14-19).

155

As seen on, the paragonal rivalry in ―Rape of Lucrece‖ is very dramatic and

straightforward while it also encourages paragonal deviation. Presumably this is the

reason behind its popularity as an ekphrastic narrative especially in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries (Hollander 18; Mitchell Picture 56). More essentially ―Rape

of Lucrece‖ may be regarded as a representation of the territorial supremacy of the

verbal against the visual in the Renaissance. Although this paragonal relationship has

been introduced in the previous chapter, it should be remembered that the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries were the times during which poetry (or writing in general)

as a form of art began to dominate painting (or plastic arts in general) as the supreme

form of expression and artistic activity (Lessing 76; Heffernan 44; Berger 13; Grahan

466). No matter how a small number of lyrics and epigrams praising painters and

painting like Herrick‘s ―Upon a Painted Gentlewoman:‖ ―Men say y'are fair, and fair

ye are, 'tis true; / But hark! We praise the painter now, not you‖ (1-2)23

, had been

composed during this period; the majority of notable poets like Dryden have

followed Shakespeare and thanked God for the gift of poesy:

O gracious God! how far have we

Profan'd thy heavenly gift of Poesy!

Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,

Debas'd to each obscene and impious use,

Whose harmony was first ordain'd above,

For tongues of angels and for hymns of love!

(―Ode To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew‖ 56-61)24

.

23 A similar epigram by Herrick entitled ―Painting Sometimes Permitted‖ reads: ―If nature do deny / Colours, let

Art supply‖ (1-2). 24 The full title of the poem is ―Ode to the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady, Mrs. Anne

Killigrew, Excellent in the Two Sister Arts of Poesy and Painting.‖ Apart from this poem, Lessing, in his

Laoöoon, mentions Dryden‘s ―Song for St. Cecilia Day‖ as a great work full of ―musical pictures‖ and verbal

power, still appreciating the governance of poetry against painting (76).

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3.3. Painter Poems: “„Paint this,‟ „Draw that‟”25

An important development in the Renaissance and the seventeenth-century poetry

was the popularity of painter poems26

and emblem poems. It is not surprising to find

out that generations of poets, who had been educated with books of emblems,

mythological imagery, and rhetoric at nunneries and grammar schools, come up with

poetry about and with images, painting, and emblematic figures. Originally the

source for painter poems is considered to be the Greek poet Anacreon‘s odes (sixth

century BC), which was translated into English by Thomas Moore (Heffernan 100,

211)27

. Anacreon‘s Ode XXVIII, for instance, both commands the painter draw in its

opening ―Painter…/ Come, my absent Mistress take / As I shall describe her‖ (1, 3-4)

(qtd. in ibid. 214). Hence from Anacreon‘s odes to Quintilian‘s Institutio Oratoria28

,

which is considered to be the basic source for Renaissance rhetoric, and from

Horace‘s Ars Poetica to Dryden‘s 1695 translation of Dufresnoy‘s De Arte

Graphica, Renaissance and post-Renaissance poets had been familiar with the use of

imagery, advice-to-painter diction, progymnasmatic rhetoric, and the close

relationship between the word and the image (Warren Taylor 5)29

.

25 From a seventeenth-century street ballad ―Poets of Old about to Write Did Use‖ (8). This lyric is probably

composed by Edmund Waller‘s editor (Colie 147; Hollander 26). 26 These poems are also known as ―painter satires‖ or ―advice-to-a-painter genre‖ however these terms are not

used to imply ekphrastic sense (Ray 172; Burrows 281). Therefore, I will stick to my own term, painter poem, as

it has been indicated earlier. 27 Thomas Moore‘s 1800 translation was entitled Odes of Anacreon Translated into English Verse with Notes

(London: John Stockdale). 28 Quintilian‘s Institutio Oratoria explains rhetoric in a series of steps: inventio (gathering materials), dispositio

(arrangement), pronuntiatio (reduction), memoria (memorizing), docere (informing and depicting), delectare

(delighting), movere (moving and forming a clear picture of the described object for the mind‘s eye). According

to Warren Taylor the Tudor rhetoric has re-shaped some of Quintillian‘s items and their functions in order to

adjust in accordance with the Renaissance norms (5-6). 29 Some of the other essential sources of Renaissance rhetoric that influenced the development of emblem poetry

and painter poems are Andrea Alciati‘s Emblematum Liber (1531) (which was the first emblem book used in

England), German theologician Johannes Matthaeus‘s curriculum, Sebald Hayden‘s Formulae Puerilim

Colloquiorum pro Primis Tyronibus, Erasmus‘s De Civilitate, Joachim Camerarius‘s Praecepta Morum

Puerilium, Hermes Trismegistus‘ hermetic philosophy, Christoforo Buodelmonti‘s Hieroglyphica of Horapollo

(1419 - later on translated by Paggio Bacciollini), Leone Battista Alberti‘s architectural writings, Francesco

Colonna‘s Dream of Poliphilo (1499), Valeriano‘s Hieroglyphica, which was very influential on English emblem

poetry, Mantegna, Bellini, Durer, Geoffrey Whitney‘s A Choice of Emblems (1586), and George Wither‘s A

157

Both emblem poems, which illustrate the context of the poem on the page such as

Herbert‘s ―Easter Wings,‖ and painter poems, which urge painters to draw their

subjects in appropriate ways such as Marvell‘s ―Last Instructions to a Painter,‖ are

essential to understand the development of ekphrastic tradition in English especially

in terms of paragonal relationship. First, these poems show that the relationship

between the image and the word is moving away from its metaphorical state. For the

first time in the history of ekphrasis, the verbal and the visual have the chance for

physical contact on the page in such established forms. In ―Easter Wings,‖ for

instance, the wings that form the two stanzas become the poem itself. It is also

possible to think the opposite: Herbert‘s lines turn out to represent the two wings that

help the poet to rise ―as larks, harmoniously‖ to meet God (8). Secondly, parallel to

―Rape of Lucrece‖ example, they demonstrate how the verbal was regarded

dominant over the visual in the Renaissance. For emblematic poems, it is possible to

claim that the poem on the page becomes a paragonal trap for the image it represents.

Although the image and the poem seem interdependent, it is primarily the poem the

readers pay attention. Besides, the image is lost if the receivers of the poem are

listeners, not readers. The momentary effect of the image, therefore, vanishes once

the poem on the page rises from its silent ekphrastic state and begins to be read aloud

in words; it is when the image becomes a mere literary gesture while the state of

dead ekphrasis is removed from the verbal, or the poem itself.

As for the painter poems, the supremacy of the word is more obvious. It is the poet

who advises and instructs the painter to paint through poetry. In this case, poet‘s

Collection of Emblems (1635) (Ulu ―New Voices‖ 165; Ormerod and Wortham xxv; Brooks 85; Hollander 37-

39).

158

words command the creator of images. One of the most notable examples of painter

poems is Marvell‘s 1667 poem ―Last Instructions to a Painter‖ (Hollander 25).

Marvell satirizes Edmund Waller‘s ―Instructions to a Painter,‖ another painter poem

itself. Waller‘s ―Instructions‖ elaborates and commemorates the 1665 English naval

victory over the Dutch Navy and offers a painter to depict the English Navy in such a

way that the English were to be represented as the favourite of God. Waller,

following the narrative strategies of ancient epics, begins to instruct the painter right

away: ―First draw the sea, that portion which between / The greater world and this of

ours is seen‖ (1-2). The opening of the poem gives clues about Waller‘s point of

view. The first is that he both instructs and directs the painter to ―draw,‖ with an

imperative. Secondly, he wants to painter to draw the sea first which divides the

―greater world,‖ probably a reference to the newly discovered America, and the

world of ―ours,‖ or the English world. Marvell opposes with this second point

especially and criticises Waller‘s showy and overtly nationalistic diction (Colie 146).

The result, ―Last Instructions to a Painter,‖ which is almost ten times longer than

Waller‘s ―Instructions,‖ is a ―bitingly satirical‖ painter poem (Hollander 26).

Marvell urges the same painter to depict the engagements of the fleets more

realistically:

After two sittings, now our Lady State

To end her picture does the third time wait.

But ere thou fall'st to work, first, Painter, see

If't ben't too slight grown or too hard for thee.

Canst thou paint without colors? Then 'tis right:

For so we too without a fleet can fight.

(1-6).

159

The poem opens with an invocation of the painter to finalize the painting he has been

drawing. This ―sitting‖ being the third one, Marvell instructs him to be more

precautious this time to do the painting ―right,‖ that is, accordingly and true-to-life.

The title of the poem also indicates that his guidance is the ―last‖ one and in this way

Marvell surpasses Waller‘s poem and proves it to be needless anymore. However, as

far as ekphrastic tradition is concerned, Marvell‘s commanding paragonal diction is

more important than urging the painter to stick to the photographic reality. His

emphasis on painter‘s inability to represent reality is worth noting. Examining the

―fallen-to-work‖ painter, he finds out that representing the truth by way of painting is

too ―hard for thee [him]‖ to deal with. After urging the painter to rise and ―paint,‖ he

seems to mock the paragonal fallout of painting by asking the painter ―Canst thou

paint without colors?‖ (5). The satire, then, does not only fall on Waller but also on

the painter and the art of painting. Marvell, nevertheless, follows Waller in this

respect; using imperatives as Waller does, he also seems to be instructing the painter

not figuratively but literally. The poem contains the imperative use of the verb

―paint‖ for twenty-five times, ―draw‖ for eighteen times, and the verbs like ―see‖ and

―turn‖ for more than twenty times in a demanding way as in:

Dear Painter, draw this Speaker to the foot;

Where pencil cannot, there my pen shall do't:

That may his body, this his mind explain.

Paint him in golden gown, with mace's brain,

…

Paint last the King, and a dead shade of night

Only dispersed by a weak taper's light

(1019-1022; 1076-1077)30

.

30 Emphasis added.

160

The same decreeing manner of using imperatives is a common feature of painter

poems. The use of imperatives, for instance, is easier to observe in Herrick‘s short

poem entitled ―To His Nephew: To be Prosperous in His Art of Painting:‖

On, as thou hast begun, brave youth, and get

The palm from Urbin, Titian, Tintoret,

Brugel and Coxu, and the works outdo

Of Holbein and that mighty Rubens too.

So draw and paint as none may do the like,

No, noth the glory of the world, Vandyke.

(1-6)31

.

The poem, addressed to one of Herrick‘s close relatives, is composed of two

sentences; the first one occupying the first four lines and the second the rest.

Although the addressee is his nephew, it should be noted that both of Herrick‘s

sentences are imperatives. As the first four lines asks his nephew to ―get the palm‖ of

essential painters like Urbin (Raphael), Titian, and Holbein and to ―outdo‖ their

works, the second part urges him to ―draw and paint‖ in a unique way.

There are around thirty painters poem in the canon and all these examples such as

Edmund Waller‘s ―Of the Misreport of Her Being Painted‖ (1666) and ―To Van

Duck‖ (1667), Sir John Denham‘s ―Directions to a Painter‖ (1665), ―Second Advice:

‗Nay Painter‘‖ (1665) and ―Third Advice‖ (1666), Herrick‘s ―The Eye‖ (1668) and

―To the Painter, to Draw Him a Picture‖ (1669), John Dryden‘s ―To Sir Geoffrey

Kneller‖ (1693?), John Donne‘s ―Elegie V: His Picture‖ and ―To Anne Killingrew‖

(1612-1613?), Ben Jonson‘s ―The Picture of Her Body,‖ and finally Marvell‘s series

31 In the same way, Herrick‘s ―To the Painter, to Draw Him a Picture‖ contains only eight verbs all of which are

imperatives.

161

of satirical poems (other than ―Last Instructions‖) ―Second Advice to a Painter,‖

―Third Advice to a Painter,‖ ―Fourth Advice to a Painter,‖ and ―Fifth Advice to a

Painter‖ (all between 1666-1669) contain a diction that secretly undermines painting

while they also directly put poetry over plastic arts. In other words, as they lay claim

to the same artistic territory with painting, it is understandable that painter poems

share such a charging fashion to gain supremacy as far as their diction is concerned.

162

3.4. Ben Jonson: “The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Book”32

Even though it is one of Ben Jonson‘s minor poems, one of the most representative

ekphrastic poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is his ―The Mind of the

Frontispiece to a Book.33

‖ The poem, which is basically an emblem poem since it

accompanies an emblematic engraving, is composed on the frontispiece34

of Sir

Walter Raleigh‘s History of the World (1614). The frontispiece ―The Mind‖ is

celebrating is an engraving by Renold Elstrack, one of Raleigh‘s editors (See

Illustration I.iv.). Elstrack‘s engraving is an allegorical picture displaying figures like

Experientia (History, as an old woman), Veritas (Truth, as a young lady with a

glimmering right hand), Magistra Vitæ (The Mistress of Life, a bare-breasted sun-

crowned woman carrying the globe), Mors (Death, a skeleton), Oblivio (Oblivion, as

a sleeping Roman peasant), angels (represented by Fama Bona (The Good) and

Fama Mala (The Evil)), and Providentia (Providence, as an unblinking eye).

As an emblem poem accompanying an engraving, the poem, along with the

engraving itself, carries the features of seventeenth-century art works35

. Like a

Metaphysical poem, it investigates the structure of the engraving while the engraving

is also displaying a Wren-style architectural design. Because the early seventeenth

century experienced a considerable development in architecture, the engravings,

paintings, emblems as well as poetry gave credits to architectural designs (Reid 229;

32 A full-text verson of the poem has been supplied in Appendix V. 33 Referred to as ―The Mind‖ henceforth. 34 The word ―frontispiece‖ drives from the Latin ―frontispicium‖ meaning ―frontview‖ or ―façade.‖ The word was

used to indicate the first page, usually illustrated with an emblem or engraving, of a book from the early

Renaissance to the nineteenth century (OED). 35 Ong argues for the opposite. He believes that Jonson‘s poem is an exception to the seventeenth-century

conventions (Ong 117-118). This is probably because he regards the poem (and Jonson), not as a product of the

scientific and artistic developments of the time as the Metaphysical poets were, but as a down-to-earth Cavalier

poet and playwright.

163

Parry 175-177). Parallel to this, Jonson‘s poem follows the design on the paper and

takes the readers to a tour on the engraving:

From Death and dark Oblivion, ne‘er the same

The Mistress of Man‘s life, grave History

Raising the World to Good or Evil Fame

…

She [Experience] cheerfully supporteth what she rears

Assisted by no strengths but are her own,

Some note of which each varied pillar bears

(1-3; 14-16).

In this sense, the poem is a guideline to ―seeing‖ Elstrack‘s engraving teaching how

to ―read‖ the images. This point is also illustrated in the title of the poem. The word

―mind,‖ as in Lovelace‘s line ―None but my Lilly ever drew a Minde‖ in his ―To My

Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly,36

‖ suggests the primary parallelism and the

representation of what the engraving presents; it is the ―mind‖ and ―soul‖ that makes

―their ways…understood‖ (7).

The poem conducts its scanning and reading of the image in an orderly way.

Elstrack‘s work displays four levels of imagery37

, all presenting allegorical

characters. Each figure is foregrounded in the painting since they are the first figures

that attract attention. The first level gives Death and Oblivion at the bottom, where

they lay inactively. The second, and the central level displays the Mistress of Life,

who is surrounded by the third level presenting History and Truth. The last level

presents the Good, the Evil, and Providence and occupies the top. The poem

36 See section, 3.5., for details. 37 Hollander thinks that the engraving has three linear levels. He considers History, Truth and The Mistress of

Life on the same (second) level (119).

164

surprisingly follows the foregrounded images in the painting. Both syntactically and

lexically, Jonson foregrounds each of four levels in a peculiar way; there is not a

stanza pattern but the poem has four sections as well. The poem opens with a

reference to the level at the bottom (―From Death and dark Oblivion [rise]‖) though

the central figure is the Mistress of Life, ―raising the World to Good and Evil Fame‖

(3). The first part, which relates the second level in the engraving, is composed of a

single sentence in the first four lines. Then the second part of the poem comes that

takes place between the next four lines, still in a single syntactical pattern. The

second part, however, focuses on the upper level of the image:

Wise Providence would do so: that nor the good

Might be defrauded, nor the great secured,

But both might know their ways were understood

When Vice alike in time with Virtue dured.

(4-7).

The third and the fourth sections present Truth and Experience, respectively. It is

interesting that, just as the first two parts, each of these sections consist of one

sentence, though there are five lines in each. As the focus of the poem has now

moved to the images in the middle, Jonson deals with details. He scrutinizes at the

pillars, items, and emblems, which characterize the figures:

Which makes that (lighted by the beamy hand

Of Truth that searcheth the most hidden springs

…

She [Experience] cheerfully supporteth what she rears

Assisted by no strengths but are her own,

Some note of which each varied pillar bears,

By which, as proper titles, she is known:

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Time‘s witness, Herald of Antiquity,

The Light of Truth, and Life of Memory

(10-11; 14-20).

The four sections, which are represented by the four pillars and the four ―proper

titles‖ of History, almost follow the order of making the sign of the cross38

. As the

four edges of the cross lead while someone is crossing himself or herself, the poem,

in its relation to the image it represents, begins in the middle, moves upwards

towards the eye of Providence, then moves to the left and then to the right. This

claim could sound over-stated39

; nonetheless it is clear that the poem peculiarly

follows the numerological order of the engraving as it follows the four levels (along

with four figures and/or levels) in four parts and in four sentences.

Because the poem provides a step by step reading of the engraving and forms a

syntactical parallelism between the word and the image, it is possible to label it as a

mimetic ekphrastic poem. Just as ―This Figure, that Thou Seest Here Put,‖ another

Jonson poem that accompanies Shakespeare‘s first folio, ―The Mind‖ is an

instruction, not to the painter (unlike his ―The Picture of Her Body,‖ another

ekphrastic poem by Jonson), but to the reader. Focusing on the central images, it

seems to be teaching the right way to analyse the engraving as opposed to the

demanding diction in his ―The Picture of the Body,‖ where he advices the painter to

paint Lady Venetia Digby in a dignified manner 40

. Therefore, as far as the paragonal

38 See Illustration I.v. 39 The only reason why I am calling my statement ―over-stated‖ is because the book that accompanies Jonson‘s

poem, History of the World, is slighly about faith, philosophy, and religion. Otherwise, I believe that the stylistic

structure of my assumption would fit to the context. 40 In this sense, ―The Mind‖ is closer to Jonson‘s ―My Picture Left in Scotland,‖ a short poem that concentrates

on the hurtful feeling a picture (a gift from a lady) has created.

166

relationship is concerned, one might call the poem a tie; neither Elstrack‘s engraving

nor Jonson‘s poem seems to gain territorial supremacy on the grounds of paragone.

Technically the poem does not have metrical concerns. Apart from the abab rhyme

scheme that is found in majority of emblematic pieces of the time, it shows that

Jonson did not have structural worries while composing ―The Mind.‖ Enjambment,

as a poetic device, is effortlessly detectable and deliberately foregrounded in a way

that mimics cross-motion the poem suggests. Lexically deviated, some of the words,

especially names, are capitalised; such capitalisation of names of the allegorical

figures makes the poem easy to follow. Jonson writes as he sees the engraving

though a first person narration is not to be found in the poem. Indeed, the poem is

very poor in terms of pronouns; there are only four pronouns (the subject pronoun

―she‖ occurring three times and the possessive adjective ―her‖ occurring only once)

all of which refer to Experience at the last six lines. Lack of pronouns and

prosopopeial statements may re-indicate that the poem is not trying to dominate the

image; instead, it celebrates the engraving by focusing on the figures, and not on the

poetic persona, narrator, or narrator‘s views and comments.

Subsequently, Jonson‘s poem, which is initially an example of mimetic ekphrasis,

brings forward the image in front of its listeners. As a powerful poem as far as

enargeia is concerned, it represents the picturesque and well-expressed ekphrastic

poetry that describes visual works of art. Although it is hard to sense a paragonal

relationship, the structural and thematic ties between the poem and what it represents

makes ―The Mind‖ a genuinely ekphrastic poem.

167

3.5. Richard Lovelace: “To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly”41

―To My Worthy Friend‖ is an occasional poem that celebrates both Sir Peter Lely‘s42

accomplished painting (See Illustration I.vi.) and King Charles then-troubled reign

and dynastic line. Lovelace‘s poem has been regarded as a representative piece that

contains clues about the Royalist spirit of the early seventeenth century (Farmer 57;

Anselment 367; Pace 12-14). It idealizes King Charles and the future king James, as

eagle and ―the true Eaglet‖ (11). However, ironically, the painting was probably

painted while King Charles was kept at Hampton Court and his public appearance

was prohibited by the Republican forces (Hollander 122; Anselment 373). Hence, the

poem, as well as the painting, could have aimed to rise the king‘s spirits up and to

clear up the clouded skies for the ―Royall Sitters:‖

See! what a clouded Majesty, and eyes

Whose glory through their mist doth brighter rise!

See! what an humble bravery doth shine,

(1-3).

The poem is divided into two sections in a clandestine way. The first section is

composed of two stanzas. This section, which is further divided into two stanzas (the

first in ten and the second in six lines), has sixteen lines; the latter part is, too, made

of sixteen lines (four lines in the first and twelve lines in the second stanza). No

matter how irregular the lineation may look, Lovelace was just enough to provide

equal space for the painting (as well as the king and the duke of York) and his friend

41 The full title of the poem is ―To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly: on that Excallent Picture of His Majesty,

and the Duke of York, Drawne by him at Hampton-Court.‖ The poem will be referred to as ―To My Worthy

Friend‖ henceforth. The full-text of the poem is available in Appendix VI. 42 The spelling of the name varies from Lily to Lilley (Pepys‘s spelling). In this study, Horace Walpole‘s spelling

―Lely‖ is going to be used as it is usually followed in the twentieth century (443-444). Although Lely was not

knighted when he painted the painting, his title, ―Sir,‖ will accompany his name throughout.

168

Sir Lely. As the first part opens with an invocation to the readers to ―see‖ the

painting, the second part draws the attention, not to the painting or the royal family,

but to Sir Lely: ―These my best Lilly with so bold a spirit /… didst draw‖ (17-19).

The encomium for Lely, which contains references to precious stones and crystals, is

no less eulogised than the first section, in which ―mightiest Monarchs‖ are depicted

in ―richest looke‖ (9-10).

The poem is one of the early examples of actual ekphrasis, providing details about

the painting it represents. For Sir Lely was a close friend of Lovelace, the poet seems

certain about the name of the painting and where it was painted. The wordy title of

the poem is not unusual because, functional as it was, there was a tendency to

commemorate the events and/or people within the title of the poem especially in the

seventeenth century. In terms of contextual ekphrasis, it is hard to label the poem as

mimetic or meditative. No matter how the poem represents the painting in a

straightforward manner, Lovelace‘s eloquent vocabulary and eulogised encomium

with his commentaries put the poem somewhere between mimetic and meditative

ekphrasis. The rhyme scheme, aabb, is in accordance with typical eulogy layout

though the iambic foot is deviated and does not follow the rhyme regularity. The

capitalized and italicised words like ―Majesty,‖ ―Eaglet,‖ ―Lilly,‖ and ―Flame‖ are

often repeated as the seventeenth century literary convention of punctuated emphasis.

The elaborate diction is parallel to the elegantly dressed members of the royal family

in Lely‘s painting; there are sophisticated similes (as Lovelace likens Lely‘s painting

to ―Chrystall typified… spot‖ [25]), showy lexis (as in ―eyes / Whose glory through

their mist doth brighter rise!‖ [1-2]), stylish puns (as in the ―Sun,‖ which is used both

169

for the king and for the ―Eaglet‖ prince [12]), and frequent exclamatory remarks (as

in ―Never did happy misery adorn!,‖ ―So sacred a contempt!,‖ and ―How it command

the face!‖ [5-7]).

Hollander criticises Lovelace for having misread the painting to a clearly Royalist

end (123). However, Hollander probably ignores the fact that painting, as well as

Lely himself, was meant to represent the royal family within a Royalist perspective

since Lely‘s Royalist tendency was publicly known. Anselment‘s criticism, on the

other hand, is more acceptable. He states that the poem does not focus on the

painting as a whole or on its artistic context as in the matter of the ignored pose, in

which James hands out something to the king (369; 371)43

. It is true that Lovelace, as

does Lely, seems to pay little attention to the pose in which the king and his son is

painted; neither the content of the paper (or letter) the king is holding nor the object

(penknife or scissors) the boy is handing out are referred to or explained. However,

the poem does follow the painting‘s structural layout. At this point, it is better to

explicate the stylistic parallelism that springs from the two sections of the poem as

mentioned earlier. The covertly partitioned poem is actually representing the

painting‘s artistic design on the canvas. Such an economy of the canvas by splitting it

into two was known as Van Dyckian style and both the king and Lely himself were

great admirers of Van Dyck (Walpole 443-444; Whinney and Millar 170-171). Here

Lovelace copies Lely‘s dual style that separates the painting into two by the dark

43 Anselment depends his point on the typified descriptions of the painting found in George Vertue‘s Vertue

Notebooks (1929) and Baker‘s 1912 book Lely and the Stuart Portrait (369-370). In these descriptions, Lely‘s

painting has been defined as a realistic work in which the future king offers his father a ―penknife or scissors‖

(qtd. in Anselment 370).

170

green drapery that hangs over Charles‘s shoulder44

. The right side shows ―the true

Eaglet‖ in open air. The same stylistic portioning is repeated in the stanza division of

the poem. The clouds in the background reveal that the ―clouded Majesty‖ in the

poem is not the king but his son. The left side of the painting, however, is an indoors

depiction showing the king shaded by dark drapery probably signifying the

suppressed locked-in king although Lovelace is too shy (and maybe afraid) to admit

it.

Lovelace‘s poem contains further clues on the divided nature of the painting.

Although the young James is depicted outdoors, which makes one assume that he has

a long life to head on in the future, the sky is cloudy:

See! what a clouded Majesty, and eyes

Whose glory through their mist doth brighter rise!

See! what an humble bravery doth shine,

And griefe triumphant breaking through each line,

How it commands the face! so sweet a scorne

Never did Happy Misery adorne!

(1-6).

As the brighter side is occupied by James, he is the one who is supposed to

experience the hopeful future, foregrounded by the ―brighter rise.‖ However, his

future is ―cloudy‖ due to the problematic and politically-troubled Stuart dynasty

because Lovelace is aware of the fact that the Hampton Court is surrounded by the

Roundheads. This dilemma is observed in the surprisingly substantial number of

stylistic instances. Lovelace uses oxymoron and antithesis for fourteen times in a

44 See Illustration I.vii.

171

daring manner and the majority of these figures of speech occur in the first stanza,

where the future king James is implied: ―clouded Majesty,‖ ―glory…mist,‖ ―humble

bravery,‖ ―griefe triumphant,‖ ―happy misery,‖ ―sacred…contempt,‖

―shine…shaded,‖ ―victorious sorrow,‖ and so on. While readers are left with an

ambiguous tone due to such contradictory lexis, the diction is dynamic and strong

which indicates the youth and energy of the prince:

See! what a clouded Majesty!

…

See! what an humble bravery doth shine,

…

How it commands the face! so sweet a scorne

Never did Happy Misery adorne!

So sacred a contempt, that others show

To this, (oth' height of all the wheele) below,

That mightiest Monarchs by this shaded booke

May coppy out their proudest, richest looke.

(1-10).

The exclamatory and decisive aura created by imperatives, exclamations, and

invocations contrasts with the second stanza. As in the poem, the painting saves the

darker side for the king. There are only six lines, presumably indicating the shorter

life span Lovelace foresees for the king, and the vocabulary is gloomy and the

diction loses its energy:

Whilst the true Eaglet this quick luster spies,

And by his Sun's enlightens his owne eyes;

He cures his cares, his burthen feeles, then streight

Joyes that so lightly he can beare such weight;

Whilst either eithers passion doth borrow,

And both doe grieve the same victorious sorrow.

(11-16).

172

This passage devoted to the king opens with a reference to the young prince, ―Whilst

the true Eaglet this quicker luster spies,‖ and ends with the deviated gloomy

atmosphere that recalls the end of the troubled king: ―And both doe grieve the same

victorious sorrow.‖ Both the king and the duke clearly suffers from the distressed

Stuart line. However, it is the king who seems to have given up and had his time:

―He cures his cares, his burthen feeles… / …so slightly he can beare such weight.‖ In

short, both the poem and the painting draw a dim picture for the Stuarts: one with

saddening vocabulary and the other through darker colours.

A final point considering the stylistic tie between the painting and the poem would

be to focus on the gestures. The painting shows King Charles as standing before a

darker panorama. Parallel to this, Lely has depicted the king in a dark seventeenth-

century shirt bearing a shiny emblem that resembles the ―Sun‖ Lovelace is referring

to. More to the point, he is standing on a stick with a note or a letter in his hand45

. At

the time of painting, the king might have asked for the stick to stand on throughout

the pose for it takes hours to finish a portrait. Although the king is not leaning on the

stick, he is holding it tight as represented in the king in Lovelace‘s poem who cannot

―beare such weight.‖ His looks do not meet those of James‘s; they lead into void as

he can hardly hold out his hand for the reach of James‘s hand. On the other hand, the

duke, who has the ―Flame‖ of youth, is depicted with his hand on his waist; he is

able to stand without the assistance of an object. He looks confident in his looks,

directed to his father, who refuses to exchange gazes. The penknife, or the pen, he is

holding out does not reach the king but thinking about the long hours he had to hold

45 See Illustration I.viii.

173

out his hand on the air, one should not be surprised why Lovelace indicates his youth

through his ―bravery,‖ ―glory,‖ and ―proudest, richest looke.‖ While James stands

proud and strong (―How he commands the face!‖), King Charles only ―cures his

cares.‖

The last two stanzas celebrate Lely the painter. As Lovelace celebrates Lely‘s

accomplishment, further clues on the dual nature of the poem and of the painting are

revealed:

These, my best Lilly, with so bold a spirit

And soft a grace, as if thou didst inherit

For that time all their greatnesse, and didst draw

With those brave eyes your Royal Sitters saw.

...

Thou dost the things Orientally the same

Not only paintst its colour, but its Flame:

Thou sorrow canst designe without a teare,

And with the Man his very Hope or Feare;

So that th' amazed world shall henceforth finde

None but my Lilly ever drew a Minde.

(17-20; 27-32).

Lely is praised for his ability to paint ―sorrow…without a teare.‖ The sorrow of the

surrendered king is indeed successfully implied as it has been indicated in his empty

looks, dark outfits, stick, and his dark background. As the dual structures of the

painting and the poem match, the king is now called the ―Feare‖ and the son is called

the ―Hope.‖

The paragonal lines that urge readers (and probably the viewers of the painting) to

―see‖ occur twice. The imperatives invite reader-viewers to see both the painting and

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the condition of the ―Royall Sitters.‖ Unlike the painter poems, which challenge

painters to ―draw‖ and ―paint,‖ Lovelace tries to evoke the readers to ―see.‖ As a

friend of Lely and an admirer of the art of painting, Lovelace avoids getting involved

in a verbal-against-visual dispute; he simply celebrates a well-accomplished painting

of a friend of his which depicts the leading figures of his nation. In this sense, the

poem remains loyal to the painting as did Lovelace to the Royalist cause.

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3.6. The Ekphrastic Inheritance

The ekphrastic tradition until the Romantic Age provides general characteristics of

ekphrasis in English. As it has been explained in the above sections, from the ancient

examples to the eighteenth century, ekphrasis has articulated itself as a major literary

device and a popular way of expression representing visual works of art. These

qualities have passed to the future generations only to be developed and used more

extensively.

Much has changed in ekphrasis from the simplistic progymnasmatic teachings like

enargeia and perspicuitas46

, and Plato‘s accusations that ―painting and poetry are

false simulations‖ (The Republic 641). From Aristotle‘s assumption that verbal and

visual arts should be considered as ways that lead to reality and as ―arts of rest,‖ to

the Renaissance idea that verbal expression is more powerful than the visual,

ekphrasis has been revitalised and exercised both critically and artistically (Harvey 2;

Lessing xii). Therefore, while painting told its own stories through the Middle Ages

into the Renaissance and after (Alberti 93), poetry gradually and inescapably became

acquainted with painting, emblems, iconography, and images (Graham 471).

Eventually the ambiguity of the word graph (referring to both writing and painting,

or to image and discourse) and of the word schema (referring both to the figures and

to the writings in rhetoric melted away to meet the verbal and the visual in the word

ekphrasis and in Horace‘s axiom ―ut pictura poesis‖ (Plitz and Åström 50). In short,

46 Similar to enargeia, perspicuus, too, refers to ―pictorial vividness‖ in a more exact way (Sumi 8). Therefore, in

addition to Sumi‘s translation, ―mere clarity,‖ or ―pure precision‖ could be regarded as more accurate

explanations for the word. Here, it is also necessary to refer to Sumi‘s observation that even in eastern culture

similar rhetorical concepts had been used as the Arabic wasf (along with the synonyms taswir and tamthil),

meaning ―vivid representation or comparison‖ (Sumi 7, 15).

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until the Romantic Age, poetry and painting had already made it into a mutual

relationship though this relationship usually involved an attempt to capture the visual

in words.

Blackhawk believes that by the end of the seventeenth century the idea that fields of

art had already begun to share parallel territories in terms of creativity in a conscious

manner. Comparing the development of ekphrasis until the seventeenth-century to

the modern ekphrasis, he states that the common feature in ekphrasis is the

invocation of creativity:

It seems that works of art, in and of themselves, have the power to create

creativity […] looking at a work of art is like looking into the act of

creation […] Art gives us imagery – images that are representational

rather than ‗real‘. Art requires leaps of perceiving and experiencing…

[and] the image is a wonderful stimulus to writing‖ (2)47

.

Indeed, the idea that images provoke ―a wonderful stimulus to writing‖ and creativity

is the leading force that has invited poets to ekphrasize. Poets, under the visual charm

of art works (either actual as in Lovelace and Jonson or fictitious as in Virgil and

Shakespeare), have composed works that proves this thought-provoking feature of

images. Before moving on to the general characteristics of ekphrastic tradition until

the Romantics, it is necessary to illustrate how a poet (or a viewer in general) is

attracted to compose poetry by looking at a work of art and how the very drive of

47 At this point, Blackhawk reminds us Edward Hisrch‘s claim that ―works of art initiate and provoke other works

of art: the process is a source of art itself‖ (qtd. in Blackhawk 2). Balckhawk also frequently refers to Susan

Langer‘s term, ―virtual space.‖ Langer claims that paintings create a virtual space, or semblance, and that the

viewer experiences this space as he experiences a dream, abstracted from reality. Yet it is real and alive in its own

terms (2). The virtual space the painting creates is a living space which is capable of taking the viewer to a ―mind

journey‖ (Blackhawk 2).

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visual attraction brings about ekphrasis. Marin, in his Sublime Poussin relates how he

was influenced by the sight of Poussin‘s 1627 painting Echo and Narcissus48

:

[Echo and Narcissus]…which I go to see in the Louvre, strikes me as not

so different from the sleep of the still life, dead nature in its body of

paint… By leaning over the mirror of the painting, like him [Poussin],

toward the smooth water that constitutes its edge, I believe I am

deciphering in the mouth with lips half open upon a final breath, in the

rings under the eyes, in the clenching of the hand as it relaxes, the surface

of quiverings of the unhappy passion of self-love, which deadly sleep

fixes in an ultimate mask… Three gazes without origin or end, without

subject or object, since they are passing simultaneously into the sleep of

things or into the reverie of the imaginary and yet are absenting

themselves from the canvas according to the three dimensions of its

space as painting (Sublime 166-7).

The ekphrastic phenomenon, which is driven by the semi-mystical attraction Marin

explains and which has dominated what might one call the first ekphrastic phase

could be defined and explained in some points. This final section of this chapter,

thus, aims to cover the general characteristics of the first ekphrastic phase (the

ekphrastic period from the ancients until the Romantics) that has shaped the

ekphrastic exercises in the following literary periods.

One of the first points that need attention in the first phase is that ekphrasis had

developed as part of larger narratives. As observed in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ovid,

and Chaucer, ekphrasis appears in the form of a functional device in epics or long

narrative poems. Especially until the end of the seventeenth century, ekphrasis had

remained loyal to its progymnasmatic roots. Although there is not a clear-cut division

between ―ekphrasis as narrative element‖ and ―ekphrasis for the sake of ekphrasis,‖ it

48 See Illustration I.ix.

178

could be claimed that it has only begun to move away from its ancient label as a

rhetorical technique in order to turn poetry into an individual literary mode when

poets began to compose idiosyncratic and original poems that were unique verbal

representations of works of art as in Jonson, Lovelace, Marvell, and Donne. As in

Lovelace‘s ―To My Worthy Friend,‖ the poet is conscious that he is composing on a

genuine art work to appreciate and represent by means of poetic line.

A second feature of these genre-setting examples is that the majority of these early

ekphrastic poems were examples of notional ekphrasis, as Hollander would put it. In

this case, they were not composed on actual works of art, or these works of art are

not known to us. The Shield of Achilles or the tapestry of Philomela may have been

real in the antiquity however there is no substantial information about their existence.

The first examples of actual ekphrasis are observed in the Renaissance as it has been

indicated in the Lovelace example. Parallel to this, it should also be mentioned that

much of these ekphrastic passages were composed on handcrafted materials other

than paintings such as cups, tapestries, armours, shields, and statues. Because the art

of painting initially developed after the fifteenth century (in Italy, first, and then in

the rest of the continent), the painting-poetry encounter took place much later in

Engand. As it has been pointed out previously, painting was regarded as a liberal art

only in the early decades of the Renaissance as found in da Vinci‘s Paragone. In

time, poets became acquainted with painters and their work as the court and the

wealthy began to patronize painters and to spend on arts.

179

Notional ekphrasis is also the reason why the term dead ekphrasis is applied best to

the ekphrastic poetry in its first phase. As it has been introduced earlier, dead

ekphrasis refers to the continuity of the silence and immobility in the works of visual

arts; then, unless a poet ekphrasizes on it or a viewer meets it, the work of visual arts

may remain locked up in its frozen world. Dead ekphrasis occurs more clearly if the

poem is notional; in this case, it is impossible for the visual, the tapestry of

Philomela, for instance, to break through if Shakespeare‘s poem, in this case, is not

read or studied. The tapestry, then, as an already inexistent object, is bound to stay on

still and soundless. This does not mean, however, that every piece of notional

ekphrasis is dead ekphrasis or that every actual ekphrasis is ―living;‖ a poet like

Homer is capable of giving life to an imaginary object through sounds, dialogues,

and senses as opposed to Rosetti, who deliberately imprisons the Arcadian shepherds

in the eternity, as it is going to be explained in the following chapter.

Since the majority of early ekphrastic poetry are epics or epic-like narrative poems,

heroism is a recurrent theme. Epic characters like Achilles, Agamemnon, Aeneid,

and Virgil (as Dante‘s guide) are usually the leading characters in these poems.

Along with them, eventually, come the supernatural qualities, intervening gods (Deus

ex machina), and other characteristics of epics such as personified inanimate objects

or aggression. Besides it should be recalled that references to the Trojan War is

surprisingly repeated apart from Homer; Virgil, Ovid, Philocratus, Hesiod, Dante,

Chaucer, and Shakespear all refer to the battle scenes either through tapestry or bas-

reliefs.

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However, there is another thematic quality that surpasses heroism. Rape or acts of

aggression against women dominates the contextual background of ekphrastic

passages especially until the Renaissance. It is possible to call Ovid the initiator of

this theme for his story of Philomela has come down to the twentieth-century through

Shakespeare‘s Lucrece. The attraction of Philomela‘s story undoubtedly lies in the

act of silencing and the ―commonly gendered antagonism‖ that has influenced many

poets (Heffernan 7). In this picture, the female is usually and brutally forced to

remain unvoiced through abduction (Lucrece), molestation (Helen, Europa), rape

(Philomela, Lucrece) or physical torture of the male (or a powerful god or goddess as

in the story of Arachne). As the general idea dictated until the twentieth century, the

women were regarded as the ―weaker sex‖ and therefore a reversed occasion (a man

being forced to remain silent) never happens in the history of ekphrastic tradition.

Subsequently, the female, who is locked up in her silence, could be likened to the

visual object while the male becomes the dynamic verbal and the aggressor through

his threatening exclamations as in the cases of Philomela and Lucrece. In other

words, the ―dynamic energies‖ of the male is always ―balanced with‖ the pacified

outlook of the female (Davies 180). So the relation between painting and poetry (as

in the relation between the poetic male and the poetic female) is one of the power

relations between word (male) and image (female):

Ekphrasis, then, is a literary mode that turns on the antagonism – the

commonly gendered antagonism – … [and] since this contest is fought on

the field of language itself, it would be grossly unequal but for one thing:

ekphrasis commonly reveals a profound ambivalence toward visual art, a

fusion of iconophilia and iconophobia, of veneration and anxiety. To

represent a painting or sculpted figure in words is to evoke its power –

the power to fix, excite, amaze, entrance, disturb, or intimidate the

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viewer – even as language strives to keep that power under control

(Heffernan 7).

To put more on Heffernan‘s point, the poet himself becomes the rapist, forcing the

she-visual slip into his own verbal territory. Only after the Renaissance and the

artistically conscious encounter of the verbal and the visual, then, the poet could be

regarded as the all-powerful, ultimate, life giving creator. The rivalry between the art

object and the poem, the female and the male, and the poet and the painter take place

between the fictitious figures (and sometimes between the poet and the narrator).

Hephaestus, for example, is depicted superior to his human counterpart Deadelus in

the Iliad in creating a flawless armour. For Heffernan, the rivalry between the verbal

and the visual is more dramatic when the sculptural status of the depicted objects is

taken into consideration. Especially in Homer and Virgil ―[the] dynamic pressure of

verbal narrative meets the fixed forms of visual representation and acknowledges

them as such‖ and this results in a metaphorical battle between the word and image

on grounds of literary language (Heffernan 19). Heffernan‘s point is further

explained by Ingarden who believes that the writers of the ancient epics were aware

of the fact that painters were limited for they are bound to depict a single moment

compared to poets who have the power to represent every phase of action (237).

Similarly, Lessing, referring to Homer, believes that the poet is more able than the

painter because he can present both the visible and the invisible (gods intervening,

spirits flying and so on) within a series of action (66). The power relations between

painting and poetry will re-appear in the Romantic Age, and in the periods following

the Romantics, in a new form where the verbal and the visual will encounter in closer

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physical competition and where the female is at the centre of the rapist gaze of the

male.

Because the major ekphrastic examples take part in narrative poems, early ekphrasis

is basically mimetic. Homer describes the Shield of Achilles in such a way that

readers almost actually see it while Ovid describes Arachne‘s tapestry only to create

a ―mind picture‖ of her accomplishment. In such examples, it is hard to observe a

meditative mode, where the poet philosophises on the work of art. Although

Shakespeare, as the narrator, and Dante, as the traveller, comment on the images they

come across and show reactions to the cruel scenes of the Trojan War, their

contemplation do not make their works purely meditative; rather, such reflections are

only functional meditative bridges that bind the two ends of mimetic passages and

word-picturing. Consequently, there is a tendency to remain loyal to the physical

appearance of the object being described and to the contextual setting the object

represents. So as in Poussin‘s words, who invites his painter friend Chantelou to

consider the context and the images at the same time, the idea was about to ―read the

story and the painting‖ especially until the nineteenth century (qtd. in Marin Sublime

45)49

.

The use of prosopopeia is also very common in the first phase. There is typically a

narrator relating the events and the presence of the narrator is always felt. The

narrator could be a third-person objective narrator like Homer-the-poet, or a first

person narrator like Dante-the-traveller. The narration may even change hands;

49 Nicholas Poussin‘s letter to Chantelou (28 April 1639). See Marin (Sublime) for details (45-49).

183

Shakespeare leaves a considerable space for Lucrece‘s monologues or; as it is

observed more dramatically in Chaucer, the narration could become a story-within-a-

story with more than one narrator. The poetic persona sometimes takes over the

narration and turns the poem into a monologue if there is an assumed receiver as in

Marvell‘s ―Last Instructions‖ and other painter poems.

A final feature of these poems is that they commonly present a process. The viewer-

listeners of these poems are exposed to acts of making or producing. The whole

shield passage in the Iliad presents Hephaestus crafting Achilles‘s armour. Similarly

Ovid represents the figures on Arachne‘s tapestry as she weaves her work. Readers

come across the bas-reliefs as Dante‘s journey leads into the Purgatory. It is even

possible to assume that many painter poems, the most representative example of

which being Marvell‘s ―Last Instructions,‖ were meant to be delivered to the painter

as he painted. This ekphrastic quality, which has not been applied as frequently as

the previous ones, provides dynamism to the ekphrastic text which is composed on

the yet stable and passive object of visual art. This is why the image of Hephaestus

with a sledge hammer or the image of Virgil walking and talking on the way is

always operating even though readers feel lost in the detailed depictions of fixed and

stabilized works of art.

CHAPTER III

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty1:”

Ekphrasis in the Romantic and Victorian Ages

After ekphrastic tradition won itself a noteworthy place in English literary history in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the next generation of poets showed more

interest in this attractive literary phenomenon and eventually ekphrasis made a

second yet more powerful re-appearance during the Romantic and Victorian Ages.

Under the influence of critics like Lessing, De Quincey, and Burke, that has been

introduced in Chapter I, the Romantics and Victorian poets produced a notable

number of poems on plastic arts. As it is going to be explained in the following

sections, although the majority of Romantic and Victorian poets seem to favour the

verbal over the visual in basic terms, the period marks the beginning of a new

direction and literary taste as far as ekphrasis is concerned. This chapter will focus on

the ekphrastic tradition in Romantic and Victorian Ages, respectively, by referring to

some of the major poems and poets of the time.

1 From Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ (49).

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4.1. Sisters Re-United: From the Romantic into the Victorian

As it has been indicated earlier, after the first encounters in the antiquity and the

Middle Ages, sister arts have experienced a closer relationship in the Renaissance

courts. The visual and the verbal began to commune with one another as their

relation came to be conceptualized in more physical terms in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. Especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, there were

significant developments that brought poetry and painting together in a new way and

understanding. Apart from the attempts of critics like Lessing and De Quincey in the

late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which have been introduced in Chapter I,

there are three noteworthy points that need attention in order to see how the

eighteenth-century re-union of the two sisters took place in a clearer way.

To understand the Romantic ekphrasis, William Blake and his work should be

covered first. Blake, as a family-educated son of a hosier, grew up with images,

hoses, engravings, and emblems (Bentley 34-36). He began copying Greek antiques

and images at the age of ten and his adolescence passed by studying Raphael,

Michalengelo, and Dürer, and copying engravings for James Basire, who was a

famous engraver in London (Ackroyd 40-42). Following his apprenticeship to

Basire, Blake became a professional engraver at the age twenty-one and entered the

Royal Academy in 1779 (Bentley 39). Three years later, Blake met John Flaxman,

the famous craftsman and artist2, who would become Blake‘s patron, and then

George Cumberland, who was to become one of the founders of National Gallery in

London. Next year, in 1783, he published Poetical Sketches, his first poetry

2 Flaxman was also the artist of the reproduction of the Shield of Achilles. See Illustration I.iii.

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collection. He also continued his engravings and published illuminated collections of

Chaucer‘s Canterbury Tales and Dante‘s Divine Comedy (ibid. 44-54). However, his

―great poetic achievement‖ came with the publication of Songs of Innocence and of

Experience in 1789 (ibid. 54). The book, as many of his publications, was an

illustrated collection of his poetry and drawings published by Blake himself. The

entire collection concentrated on the human spirit and its journey through life as well

as the contradiction between innocence (usually represented with children, lambs,

shepherds, the colour green, Arcadian settings) and experience (usually represented

with wolves, darkness, tiger, fire, and the colour red).

Blake was probably unaware of the ekphrastic developments concerning the close

relationship and/or rivalry between the verbal and the visual. However, his work

provides a turning point for ekphrasis due to his illustrations and engravings that

accompanied his hand-written poetry. Indeed, never before in the ekphrastic tradition

had the image come this close to the word even though illustrated pages were

common in many medieval books3. Blake‘s unique mixture of the visual and verbal,

as observed in the entire volume of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience and in

his interest in illustrating the noteworthy poetic works such as Chaucer‘s and

Dante‘s, proves that poetry in the Romantic Age had made a courageous move to

share the same physical space and intermingle with the image. Each poem in the

book is illustrated in such a way to form a contextual and formal unity with the

3 These books, which have often been referred to as ―illuminated pages,‖ contained drawings illustrating the

content of the books, usually on the initial pages (and letters) (Saul 50-51). However these illustrations should not

be mistaken for ekphrastic exercises; the aim in these drawings was simply to appeal to the simple-minded and

illeterate commoners and influence them with the church dogma.

187

drawing it represents4. Therefore, Blake, as an image-maker and a poet, is

exclusively original in his treatment of poetry within imagery (or imagery within

poetry) and in the equal economy he provided for the visual and the verbal. In other

words, Blake symbolically represents the close relationship between the word and

the image of the time. It is also interesting to note that Blake‘s memorial stone5 in

Bunhill Fields, London, reads: ―Nearby lie the remains of the poet-painter William

Blake.‖ It is surprising that the memorial stone does not simply label Blake as a

―poet‖ or ―painter;‖ or more essentially it does not call Blake a ―painter poet,‖ as it is

usually the case with many poets who have produced ekphrastic poetry. The name

―poet-painter‖ refers to Blake‘s poetic and painterly qualities while it also reminds us

that he was really a ―poet-painter‖ for he illustrated the narrative poetry of significant

poets like Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare.

Blake‘s work, thus, marks the beginning of a new phase, in which the visual is

revitalized and saved from its neglected position. In other words, Blake was

influential on the attention the eighteenth century poet gave to paintings as he

recalled the ancient ways of ekphrasis such as description and creating word-

pictures6. These two points are undeniably clear and easily observed in the poetry of

proceeding Romantics like Wordsworth and Shelley in different ways.

4 See Illustraions II.i. and II.ii. 5 Although the tombstone seems to indicate that Blake‘s exact burial place is unmarked, the phrase ―Nearby lie...‖

refers to the fact that the place of the stone has been changed due to a beautification project in 1965 in Bunhill

Fields (Lovejoy). See Illustration II.iii. 6 Blake was influential on the future generations to a great extend. Blake‘s interest in images, along with the

French symbolist influence that came to England with Arthur Symons‘s translation, Symbolist Movement in

Literature (1899), was also highly important in the development of English and Irish symbolist poetry (especially

of W.B. Yeats) (Kermode 127-128; 138).

188

No matter how Chapter I has dealt with the importance of the opening of public

museums, there is still need to re-emphasize and explicate how the idea of ―museum‖

has shared a seminal role in, what might be called, the second phase of ekphrasis.

Due to the socio-political, intellectual, and economic shifts in the continent, there

was a break from the traditional, the dogmatic, and the ancient in many aspects

(Gombrich The Story 480-481). The continental atmosphere of change came to

England quicker than the Renaissance, which had arrived about a century late

(Bergin 217-219). Especially the intellectual shift under the influence of the French

Revolution and the prosperity that came as a result of industrial developments in

England, the English (at least the middle and upper classes) had time to get involved

in arts more than ever. The ultimate result considering ekphrasis was the opening of

public museums. As it has introduced in Chapter I, the museum opening became a

noteworthy event in Europe in the late eighteenth century; museums opened one after

another in a frenzy of love and curiosity for art. Eventually, following essential

museums and galleries like the Vatican collections, the Vienna collections, the

Uffizi, Kunstareal, and the Louvre in the continent, England came up with two

significant institutions (Fisher 7)7: British Museum and the National Gallery

8. The

first was the British Museum, which began to be institutionalised after the generous

donations of Sir Hans Sloane, J.M.W. Turner, and Lord Elgin. The museum began to

collect its collections in 1753, when Sir Sloane donated his private collections of

antiques, drawings, and engravings and after a couple of years, the gallery enlarged

as the government acquired Townley collections (Simonsen 139). Sloane‘s

7 The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is an exception. Although it was not instutionalised until the late eighteenth

century, the private collection of Elias Ashmole was opened in 1683 for public viewing (―The Historical

Development‖). 8 The names of the institutions (―British Museum‖ and ―The National Gallery‖) reflect the eighteenth-century

sense of nationalism caused by the French Revolution.

189

generosity was followed by Lord Elgin, J.M.W. Turner, and George II himself. In

1759, the museum was finally ready to open its gates for viewers. Until 1847, when

it moved to its present building in London, the museum continued to enlarge the

scope and the number of its collections (Fisher 10-12; ―History of the British

Museum‖). The National Gallery, on the other hand, opened much later. After the

British government bought the Angerstein oil collections and Sir George Beamount

bequeathed a large amount of paintings to the government (including twelve

invaluable Claude, Rembrant, and Rubens paintings), there was need to collect these

new paintings and many others in an open-to-public space; so The National Gallery,

in two different places then, opened in 1824 (Simonsen 81; ―Collection History‖). In

a short time, thanks to the donations from painters and collectors like J.M.W. Turner,

the Gallery grew out to be an important centre of arts. The opening of the Tate

Gallery in 1897, which was founded to store the over-loaded painting collection of

the National Gallery and to save these works from the frequent fire accidents of the

National Gallery, added to the sophisticated artistic atmosphere of the time.

The opening of such museums and private collections to public is really significant

for the second phase of ekphrasis. The primary duty of a museum is to store and

protect the works of art in a safe yet public space. This means that works of art,

which had been stored in the attics and basements or had decorated the walls of

mansions and coffee houses, were to be preserved and looked after officially. The

preservation of works of art brought an end to the idea that works of art, especially

works of plastic arts, were perishable and bound to decay; as it going to be explained,

this was reflected in ekphrastic poetry as ―the expression of a profound ambivalence

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toward the timelessness of visual art‖ (Heffernan 133). Therefore, as paintings began

to be collected in museums, they were not vulnerable to the harsh treatment of time,

dust, and sun. Although the idea that assumed the existence of ―immortality through

art‖ was known and developed in the Renaissance, the opening of museums turned

this metaphorical claim to reality. Now art was thought to be the source of longevity

and survival if not of immortality. Culminated with the agile Romantic spirit, this

notion brought about a new dynamism to the already energised eighteenth-century

England and ―the Child [who] was the father of the Man‖ (Wordsworth ―My Heart

Leaps Up‖ 7) was to live through ―hope, imagination, honourable Aims / Free

Commune with the choir that cannot die‖ (Coleridge ―The Blossoming‖ 9-10)9.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, the accessibility of works of art resulted in

a great interest in paintings, sculptures, and antiques (Simonsen 140). The valuable

paintings that have been kept in private collections were now open to everyone. Even

the lower-class workers, who did not have right to vote, was permitted to experience

these precious works of art. Poets were no exception to the newly growing art-loving

community. In fact, visiting museums was a classy pass-time activity and a ―novelty‖

that required preparation and planning for poets (Bennett 110; ―The Historical

Development‖)10

. Hence poets of the time, such as Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley,

are known to be paying regular visits to museums (Bennett 66; Burwick Mimesis 10-

9 Emphasis added. ―The choir‖ refers to the muses and the arts in general. 10 A 1706 book New World of Words defines the word ―Museum‖ as ―a Study, or Library; also a College, or

Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men‖ (―The Historical Development‖). Also a German visitor expressed

his displeasure (because visitors were allowed to touch items) of the English Museums in 1710 with the following

words:

[I am displeased] at the presence of 'ordinary folk' in the Museum and surprise[d] that the

collection survived their attentions... even the women are allowed up here for sixpence; they run

here and there, grabbing at everything and taking no rebuff from the sub-custos (ibid.).

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12; Simonsen 1-12). Consequently there are many eighteenth and nineteenth-century

poems written on particular (and sometimes unnamed) works of art, which had been

composed either in the museums or after the museum visits such as Shelley‘s

―Medusa‖ or Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖. Besides, it could be beneficial to

recall that the word museum, meaning ―the House of the Muses,‖ was etymologically

derived from the Greek ―mouseion,‖ which refers to the patron divinities of arts;

accordingly, it is explicable for poets to visit museums for ―mouseial‖ inspiration.

The last factor that played role in the development of ekphrasis is the shift in

―seeing‖ and ―looking‖ that took place during the second phase. By the ―shift in

seeing‖ I mean the scientific progress made in optics while ―looking‖ refers to the

socio-cultural reception of painting and images in the late Romantic and early

Victorian ages. To begin with, it could be stated that the realistic paintings that aimed

the true-to-life and photographic projection of the target object was being replaced

with the photograph itself. As camera obscura was developed into camera, a device

that could fix the appearance of the object permanently, painting lost much of what it

has gained in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Berger 18, 28;

Crary 19-25). To put it another way, although the art of painting was still considered

a noble art, some of its functions such as recording family images (usually seen as

portraits of wealthy patrons or their family members) had been lost away to the

photographic territory of camera. The development led to the idea that painting could

only provide a simulacrum of the target object while photography was able to give

the accurate and real appearance of the same object. Therefore, the art of painting as

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the representation of visual arts11

had to suffer from another incursion after the

charge of the verbal in the last two centuries (Greenberg 36).

The inventions in optics also influenced the act of ―gazing.‖ No matter how the

―calm of the painted colours on the canvas‖ saved some safe space for painting,

photograph took painting‘s place as the real image-provider (Berger 31). Besides

painting also lost its pornographic functions as museums replaced private collections;

so the naked female images that laid in pacified and inactive poses and ornamented

the walls of wealthy lords, who enjoyed looking at them, were now hanging on the

museum walls12

. A similar case is also observed in still lifes and landscapes. Berger

believes that the increasing number of still life and landscape paintings in the late

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were because of the interest of the wealthy

landlords to show off their prosperity (99). The works of Henry Alken, Heywood

Hardy, William M. Harnett, William Jones, and Marmaduke Craddock, for instance,

usually displayed the English upper-class pass time activities such as hunting parties,

collecting antiques, gardening or banqueting13

.

Although photography made an impressive entrance, the result of these

developments was a visual-centred society with a keener eye to appreciate the visual,

whether it was a painting or a photograph. The verbal arts still held the upper hand

but the close relationship between the verbal and the visual that began with Blake

11 Photography had not been considered a branch of visual arts until the twentieth century (Gombrich The Story

490). 12 Berger explains that many lords had paid painters to paint their mistresses or favourite women images only

with pornographic reasons (49-55). For him, the male gazer enjoyed looking at the passive nudity of these mute

and mesmerised sleeping images and this was a common exercise in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries (ibid. 54-55). See Illustrations II.iv., II.v., and II.vi. for some of these paintings. 13 See Illustrations II.vii., II.viii., and II.ix. for examples.

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continued to grow into a more intimate relation and eventually ―the primary pigment

of poetry [became] the IMAGE‖ (Kermode 164). Indeed, nineteenth century put the

emphasis not on the subject matter but on the image and the abstract process that

formulated the image, and soon, ―image‖ was believed to be ―the essence of an

intuitive language‖ (ibid. 151). Hence, as museums turned the passers-by and

viewers into gazers, both poets and their works had been reshaped in terms of the

second phase of ekphrasis just as in Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ (Heffernan 93).

The emphasis on the image is reflected in Wordsworth and Coleridge‘s manifesto in

the ―Preface to Lyrical Ballads.‖ According to Wordsworth and Coleridge, poetry,

which should be composed in ―the very language of men‖ of the nineteenth century,

is ―the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [and] it takes its origin from

emotion recollected in tranquility" (51); or from:

…tranquil scenes, that universal power

And fitness in the latent qualities

And essences of things, by which the mind

Is moved with feelings of delight…

(Wordsworth The Prelude, ―School-time‖ II. 324-327)14

Poetry, then, as formulated in their well-known definition, is both a reflection and an

expression of the human mind and heart that requires immediacy and sincerity; to be

more precise, it is a ―picture of the mind‖ (Wordsworth ―Tintern Abbey‖ 62).

However, the second part of the definition is more revealing for the ekphrastic

tendency of the time; the spontaneity and overflowing feelings are rooted in the

14 Emphasis added. It should be noticed that the three of the keywords in the definition are found in these lines,

which itself summarises the Romantic poetic code in poetic lines.

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―emotion‖ and memory, which are ―recollected‖ and stored in the tranquil mind of

the poet (Bate 86; Burwick 150-155; Ganguly and Sengupta). The tranquility, then,

refers to serene memory of the human mind15

. As observed in many Wordsworth and

Coleridge poems such as ―Tintern Abbey,‖ ―Composed upon Westminster Bridge,

September 3, 1802,‖ ―Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,‖ ―Recollections of

Love,‖ and ―On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country,‖ the ―recollected‖

reflections ―in tranquility‖ are the bits and pieces of images from the poets‘

memories, childhoods, or visits. Accordingly one of the basic contextual favorites of

the Romantic Age was the nature outside as in the famous Romantic poems ―I

Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,‖ ―My heart Leaps Up,‖ ―The Nightingale,‖ ―To a

Skylark,‖ and ―The Echoing Green‖. This is probably why Romantic poets are often

referred to as ―open air poets‖ (Bate 49)16

:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

(Wordsworth ―I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud‖ 1-6).

With their images collected from the outside world, the picturesque quality of their

poetic diction, and idea of capturing the fleeting moment, the Romantics initiated the

break from typified Renaissance conventions and artistic modes; T.E. Hulme, who

15 At this point it is useful to think about Wordsworth‘s acquitance with J.J. Rousseau‘s ―Essay on the Origins of

Languages,‖ in which Rousseau states that language progresses ―from pictures to words‖ (109). The same notion

is also discussed by Derrida (Of Grammatology 294). 16 The focus on the optical reflection and images in the Romantic poetry seems like a culmination of Plato‘s idea

of the ―reflection of the ideal form‖ and Aristotle‘s idea on ―the process of the mind‖ (Burwick 157).

195

stated that ―Renaissance represented a prime historical crisis,‖ believes in the

resisting power and inspiration of the Romantics to have solved this ―crisis‖ (qtd. in

Kermode 146).17

He further states that

Never mind what the philosophers say… ask instead, what emotional

requirement in themselves [arts] are trying to satisfy… [Put] emphasis on

the visual quality of all imagery… not on their physical quality (qtd. in

Kermode 148, 150-1).

Hence the Renaissance emphasis on ―humanity‖ was replaced by the nineteenth

century emphasis on the ―humane‖ while the seventeenth-century pretentiousness

and stylish diction were replaced with intuitive knowledge of the individual and the

purified, transcendental and pictorial style of the Romantics18

. This shift is taken one

step further in the Victorian Age as arts became distinctly separated from sciences

and crafts as it is going to be explained in the following sections (Haines 40-41).

The second phase of ekphrasis, which began with Blake in the early nineteenth

century and continued with the proceeding Romantic poets in the latter half of the

century to become the Pre-Raphaelite tendency culminating the visual and verbal, is

observed in a clear way especially in the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.

Other major Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Byron had produced fewer

ekphrastic pieces compared to these three poets although they were familiar with the

17 See Hulme‘s term ―critique of satisfaction‖ for further details. 18 Heffernan believes that this notion has resulted in a ―paradox‖ as far as the Romantic ekphrasis is concerned.

He states that, Romantic ekphrasis constructs and deconstructs the concept of visual art as a medium of

transcendence simultaneously (91). He also reminds us that the idea that a work of visual art perpetuates a

fleeting appearance is so deeply embedded in the Romantic ideology that ―...we may be startled to learn just how

recently this idea has emerged in the history of discourse about art. It is nowhere to be found in the ekphrastic

literature we have examined so far‖ (ibid. 133).

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Romantic imagery and ekphrastic theoreticians like Lessing and De Quincey

(Simonsen 15). Apart from a number of lines such as Coleridge‘s ―The Picture; or

the Lover‘s Resolution‖ and Byron‘s ―On the Bust of Helen by Canova‖ and the

passage in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto IV) (both of which are composed not

on paintings but on sculptures), the majority of ekphrastic poetry of the age are

attributed to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Heffernan 124-126). Subsequently the

following sections focus on some of the most representative ekphrastic examples of

Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats19

.

19 In addition to the major Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats, some of the sources note that, Felicia

Hemans is the most prolific ekphrasizing Romantic poet with her poems like ―Properzia Rossi‖ and ―On a Picture

of Christ Bearing the Cross.‖ However, as her abscence in many anthologies shows, her work has never been

sufficient enough to find a notable place in the literary canon (Burwick 108; Hollander 37; Simonsen 71).

Because her work is not representative enough, Hemans and her work has not been included in this study.

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4.2. “Fruitless Task to Paint:” Wordsworth’s “Peele Castle”

All praise the Likeness by thy skill portrayed;

But ‗tis a fruitless task to paint for me20

Wordsworth‘s treatment of the relationship between the verbal and the visual is clear.

As he had openly declared in the epitaph above, the lines below and elsewhere, he

believes in the ―verbal superiority‖ of poetry over painting:

Discourse was deemed Man's noblest attribute,

And written words the glory of his hand;

Then followed Printing with enlarged command

For thought -- dominion vast and absolute

For spreading truth, and making love expand.

Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute

Must lackey a dumb Art that best can suit

The taste of this once-intellectual Land.

…

Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page!

Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear

Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage!

(―Illustrated Books and Newspapers 1-8, 13-15)21

.

Indeed ―…it would be hard to imagine anything more logocentric, anything more

fervently devoted to the intellectual superiority of words over pictures‖ than

―Illustrated Books and Newspapers,‖ a poem which aimed to criticize the new

tradition of ―illustrated novel‖ in daily papers, more precisely Charles Dickens‘s

Pickwick Papers, which was first published in the Illustrated London News in 1842

(Heffernan 94). However, Wordsworth the poet is a paradoxical case within the

20 From Wordsworth‘s painter-poem ―To a Painter‖ (1-2). 21 Emphasis added.

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norms of ut pictura poesis dictum. In 1837, Wordsworth went on a tour to Italy with

two of his close friends. Strolling around the galleries in Florence, he stopped in

front of a classical painting and put on a discontented gesture on his face.

Wordsworth‘s accompanying friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, who relates this story,

states that Wordsworth ―…[would] not allow the plastic artist of any kind to place

himself by the side of the poet as his equal‖ (qtd. in Shackford 72). Wordsworth is

also known to have mocked Sir Walter Scott, who had been keeping notes on

landscapes for his writings, by stating that it was utterly ridiculous to keep notes on

images while man is capable of recollecting ―mind pictures‖ (Heffernan 97)22

. It is

ironic for a poet like Wordsworth, who clearly believes in the overpowering

dominance of poetry and regards poetry as the supreme form of art, to have

composed poetry on visual arts more than any other Romantic poet; he had written a

total of twenty-four ekphrastic poems23

the majority of which reflect the beauty and

neatness of these works24

. It is still ironic that Wordsworth, as a poet of the exteriors

banishing the reproduced visuals like engravings and paintings, is one of the few

Romantic poets to entitle his ekphrastic pieces with exact details of the paintings as

in ―Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by

Sir George Beaumont‖ or ―Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture Painted by Sir

George Beaumont,‖ both praising Beaumont and his paintings (Simonsen 29, 127;

Heffernan 95).

22 See Heffernan (96-97) for details of Aubrey de Vere‘s anectode, who was one of Wordsworth‘s close friends. 23 Some of these poems are ―The Egyptian Maid; Or the Romance of the Water Lily,‖ ―Brugés,‖ ―The Pillar of

Trajan‖ and ―The Bay of Winander.‖ While some of these ekphrastic poems belong to the latter years of

Wordsworth‘s poetic career like ―To Luca Giordano,‖ which display a decay in his creativity and visuality, some

of them are found in his Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (1835) (Simonsen 1, 124-126). 24 The exact number ―twenty-four‖ belongs to Uzundemir, who believes that none of these twenty-four poems

have been considered worth studying because Wordsworth‘s other poems on nature have surpassed these poems

in quality and quantity (22). Kroeber gives the number a little above ―twenty,‖ probably being uncertain on some

of the decscriptive poems in Wordsworth‘s Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (45). Heffernan sounds certain

about the fifteen sonnets and names eight more poems from the poet‘s Poetical Works (213).

199

Written in the early summer of 1806 and published in the frontispiece of

Wordsworth‘s 1815 Poetical Works, ―Peele Castle‖ is a representative poem that

provides important clues about Wordsworth‘s diction, attitude towards visual arts,

and ekphrastic style and this is probably the reason why this poem has met more

critical appreciation than his other examples of ekphrasis25

. While some critics call

the poem ―unusual‖ due to its exact references to the painter and the painting

(Kroeber 45), some others regard it as something ―new‖ for Wordsworth, as he

himself states in the poem: ―I have submitted to a new control‖ (34) (Hollander 132).

The poem, as its title indicates, is composed on Piel Castle in a Storm, a 1805

painting by Sir George Beaumont (See Illustration I.i.), Wordsworth‘s friend and

patron (Simonsen 71-80; Hollander 131)26

. It is known that Beaumont had tried to

keep Wordsworth away from seeing the painting as he knew that it would remind

him of his brother John Wordsworth, who drowned at sea that year (Simonsen 91-

92; Hollander 131). However, Wordsworth eventually saw the painting and, ―fixated

by a picture that he sees only in memory… [he could] reproduce [it] only in words‖

(Heffernan 101)27

.

The poem is composed of fifteen quatrains and displays a clear stylistic deviation

through a dramatic change in its mode and diction. Although no division is found in

the poem except for the spaces between quatrains, it is possible to divide the poem

into five sections in terms of content. The first three quatrains concentrate on the

scenery surrounding the Castle, which Wordsworth regards as the ―rugged Pile‖ (1).

25 See Appendix VII for the full-text version of the poem. 26 Wordsworth has composed three more poems on Sir Beaumont and his paintings. 27 It is probable that Wordsworth saw the copy of Beaumont‘s painting in a smaller-scale (both the larger and

smaller versions were painted by Beaumont). The first version of the painting, which is in Leichester Museum at

the moment, is less dark and about twice the size of the smaller one. The smaller version of the painting had been

given to the poet as present by the painter the following year (Jonathan Wordsworth et al. 231).

200

In these lines, the poet remembers having seen the Peele Castle earlier and depicts

the background the Castle stands on. The image in these lines reflects Beaumont‘s

painting:

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!

Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:

I saw thee every day; and all the while

Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!

So like, so very like, was day to day!

Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;

It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;

No mood, which season takes away, or brings:

I could have fancied that the mighty Deep

Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

(1-12).

As the mode changes, the next four quatrains present another clear deviation.

Wordsworth offers an alternative picture and word-paints a brighter scenery as

opposed to Beaumont‘s painting. He states that if his hand ―had been the Painter‘s

hand...‖ he ―…would have planted thee [the Castle]… / …[in] a world how different

from this [Beaumont‘ painting]‖ (12, 16-17). The third section, which covers the

eighth, ninth, and tenth quatrains, wraps up the second section: ―Such Picture would

I at the time have made… / A stedfast peace that might not be betrayed‖ (30, 32).

The fourth part, however, is a section that reminds us Renaissance and post-

Renaissance painter-poems where he states ―this work of thine I blame not, but

commend‖ (45). In twelve lines, Wordsworth both appreciates and comments on

Beaumont‘s work, which he celebrates by calling the painting a ―passionate‖ and

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―wise and well‖ (45). The final section, containing the last two stanzas, is highly

elegiac. Although Wordsworth does not mention the death of his brother, it is clear

that the last two quatrains are composed after him:

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,

Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!

…

Such sights, or worse, as are before me here –

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

(53-54, 59-60).

As seen on, Wordsworth depicts both Beaumont‘s painting (the first and the fourth

sections) and a new painting of his own (the second section) then he also

philosophises on the feeling that the paintings (Beaumont‘s actual painting and his

visionary painting) create in his mind (the third and the fifth sections). Moving from

depiction to meditation, from meditation to celebration, and back to contemplation

again, Wordsworth presents one of the first important examples of meditative

ekphrasis. Inspired by the gloomy Beaumont painting and carried away by the sight

of the Castle, he looks into his own heart to find ―a new control‖ at the same time as

he mourns for his loss. However, as far as stylistic analysis is concerned, it is useful

to concentrate on the sections where the visual (Beaumont‘s painting and

Wordsworth‘s mind-picture) and the verbal (word-painted sections of these painting)

meet; particularly speaking, the second section (the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh

quatrains) and the fourth section (the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth quatrains)

provide more concrete and clear references to ekphrastic tradition as they also

represent Wordsworth‘s ekphrastic style. Therefore, in order to be precise, firstly the

second section will be studied followed by the fourth.

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The fourth stanza, which is a typical example of enargeia, opens with wishful

thinking where Wordsworth draws his ―mind picture‖ (Hollander 132):

Ah! then, if mine had been the Painter's hand,

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the Poet's dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine

Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven; –

Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine

The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,

Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;

No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,

Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

(13-28)28

.

He suggests Beaumont a different picture from what the painter had actually painted.

Although it is clear that this is an imaginary painting demonstrated by the unreal past

clauses, the style recalls painter poems. He does not directly instruct the painter but

states that he would have painted a ―different picture‖ – not Beaumont‘s. However,

there is a more significant element that attracts attention at first sight. Because it is a

painting that Wordsworth is drawing, the diction is highly descriptive. Indeed,

Wordsworth, who broke away from the ostentatious style of his predecessors with his

―self-created... poetic diction‖ (De Quincey ―Poetic Diction‖ 194), he prefers a

28 Emphasis added.

203

precise and common language with a straightforward ―nouny‖ style. On the lexical

level, there are only a few adjectives and verbs in these four stanzas as indicated in

the line ―No motion but the moving tide‖ (27). More importantly, the vocabulary

used in this section peculiarly contrasts with Beaumont‘s painting, which is the basis

of the major stylistic lexical deviation in the poem. Wordsworth‘s suggested

painting, as opposed to the dark vision of Beaumont‘s work, is rather soothing;

―smile,‖ ―bliss,‖ ―sunbeam,‖ ―shine,‖ ―sweetest,‖ ―ease,‖ ―quiet,‖ ―breeze,‖ ―silent,‖

―peaceful,‖ ―tranquil‖ all evoke a sense of amity and calmness. The serene

atmosphere is foregrounded by two basic background lexical motives. First is the

―glassy‖ diction (Hollander 132). The vocabulary is quite shiny and bright and it

creates a sense of relaxation: ―gleam,‖ ―light,‖ ―bliss,‖ ―sunbeam,‖ ―sea,‖ ―treasure,‖

―heaven,‖ and the verb ―shine.‖ These words contradict both with what the painting

represents and the few phrases like ―hoary Pile‖ and ―toil or strife,‖ which refer to

Beaumont‘s work. The second is the ―aerial‖ lexis, which adds to the tranquillity

created by the gleaming atmosphere. Wordsworth successfully provides extra

relaxation by using vocabulary like ―sky,‖ ―heaven,‖ ―breeze,‖ ―breathing life,‖ and

―tide.‖ Moreover the alliteration on ―s‖ and assonance on ―i,‖ and ―i:‖ provide a

phonological sense of sea and quietness as in: ―To express what then I saw… / The

light that never was, on sea… / The consecration, and the Poet‘s dream‖ (14-16);

―Beside a sea that could not cease to smile / … beneath a sky of bliss‖ (19-20); ―Of

all the sunbeams that ever shine / The very sweetest had to thee been given‖ (23-24);

―A Picture had it been of lasting ease, / Elysian quiet, without toil or strife‖ (25-

26)29

.

29 Emphasis added.

204

The picture Wordsworth paints is almost as concrete and visible as Beaumont‘s

painting. Moreover Wordsworth‘s picture is more lively and soothing than the actual

painting. Paradoxically, Wordsworth achieves this effect through a noun based

descriptive lexis which is ―surrendered in utter passivity,‖ just like the Castle itself

(Burwick 115). In other words, he gives life to a mute work of art but his life-giving

is limited to a frozen yet brighter setting; as he begins ekphrasizing, he immediately

deconstructs the dynamic qualities of the ekphrastic act of giving voice to the

painting. Beaumont‘s painting, then, maintains its silence.

The verbal compression parallelism applied on the mute art work continues in the

fourth section where Wordsworth returns to the painting. Although he states that he

is ―submitted to a new control,‖ the tone does not change. Whether the ―new control‖

is moral, intellectual, or power-operational (as in the dictating and silencing mode in

the second section) is unclear but the diction still surpasses the visual qualities of the

painting putting words over colours:

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,

If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,

This work of thine I blame not, but commend;

This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O 'tis a passionate Work! – yet wise and well,

Well chosen is the spirit that is here;

That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,

This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves,

Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,

The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.

(41-52).

205

The non-verbal style is maintained in these lines even though exclamatory phrases

like ―Then, Beaumont, Friend!‖ and ―O 'tis a passionate Work!,‖ and forceful

synonymy like ―The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves‖ occur from

time to time. The diction is more vivacious yet it is based on harsher vocabulary:

―anger,‖ ―dismal,‖ ―deadly swell,‖ ―rueful sky,‖ ―fear,‖ ―unfeeling armour,‖ ―the

fierce wind‖ and the like. The stylistic vitality is also achieved by the repetition of

demonstrative adjectives ―this‖ and ―that.‖ It is clear that Wordsworth deliberately

creates the this-that anaphora by using ―this‖ for five times and ―that‖ for three times

in five lines as in ―This work of thine I blame not, but commend; / This sea in anger,

and that dismal shore‖ and in ―Well chosen is the spirit that is here / That Hulk which

labours in the deadly swell, / This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear‖ (42-43, 45-47).

The contextual selection of words also continues. While the eleventh stanza focuses

on the sea as in ―this sea in anger, and that dismal shore,‖ the twelfth stanza recalls

the aerial atmosphere of the second section as in ―this rueful sky.‖ The theme of light

dominates the thirteenth quatrain as Wordsworth introduces ―see[ing],‖ ―look[ing],‖

and ―lightning.‖ No matter how obviously the tone changes from calm to harsh, it is

worth noting that Wordsworth does not refer to any colours; to put it another way, he

avoids using the media of visual arts even though he reflects two different paintings.

―Peele Castle‖ is a prosopopeial poem. The poetic persona, who is assumed to be

Wordsworth himself, moves from one subject to another in various modes and

moods. Although the Castle, as the key image of the poem, is not mentioned until

line forty-six, it is assumed that he is already talking about the ruin because the title

of the poem informs readers in advance. It has often been claimed that the Castle

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stands for memory and what memory represents for the persona (Levinson 112). As a

building amid the callous nature outside, forced to face hardest conditions, the Castle

is pacified and let to rest in its idleness. From this aspect, it recalls the sleeping or

silenced female that evokes the desire to gaze in its viewer. In other words, both the

painting and the Castle are bound to stay gazed and stand still. Wordsworth‘s attempt

cannot mobilize it either. Comforting at first, the painting Wordsworth draws turns

out to be unsympathetic and does not provide accurate dynamism as in Homer or

Shakespeare. In this respect, the painting could also be seen as an example of

paragonal relationship between the mute image and its counterpart, the poem. If the

painting, as the scrutinized object, is the ergon, then the parergon is the

supplementary object drawing its boundaries. In this case, the parergon becomes the

second painting introduced by the poet in words and it replaces the ergon. Then the

complementary becomes superior since it is basically the imaginary painting

Wordsworth is referring to. Although Wordsworth turns to Beaumont‘s painting

from time to time, the focus falls on his own version especially in the second and

fourth sections. In Heffernan‘s words, ―only after he [Wordsworth] remakes the

painting verbally can it represent his new vision of the world, which embodies a new,

stoic version of transcendence‖ (107). At the same time, the poet is also aware of the

tie between the two paintings (one in colour and the other is in words) as indicated in

the title of the poem. However, in a Lessing-like manner, the verbal painting as the

parergon comes to replace the original on the grounds of a different semiotic code30

.

Subsequently, although ―Peele Castle‖ is basically an occasional poem, the paragonal

conflict outdoes the inspirational elements and removes the painterly atmosphere

30 Simonsen reminds us that it is very likely that Wordsworth was familiar with Lessing‘s work (14).

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which results in a highly paragonal, paradoxically meditative, and forcefully verbal

poem.

Wordsworth represents the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century tendency to

regard the verbal over the visual. However, although Wordsworth believes in the

superiority of poetry, he is also aware of the co-existence of the two arts as observed

in the fact that he is one of the first Romantic poets to compose actual ekphrasis by

honouring Beaumont and his painting. Likewise, considering his highly pictorial

style and ability to word-paint the ―exact nature‖ (Vogler 65), William Hazlitt

champions Wordsworth as the initiator of the ―visual turn‖ of the nineteenth century

(qtd. in Simonsen 69). Consequently it would not be a mistake to claim that

Wordsworth‘s focus on the visual qualities of his poetry and interest (though with

probable dislike) in painting have been influential on the later generation of

Romantic poetry.

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4.3. The Urn of the Irony: Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

With regards to his brief life-span, Keats‘s success and productivity is startling. It is

probable that his ―ever growing poetic power‖ would have matched or exceeded

Wordsworth or Coleridge if he had not died at the age of twenty-six (Keats xviii;

Ricks 159). Still, his ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖31

is considered to be one of the most

appreciated works among English poetic tradition. Representing the ekphrastic

relation between plastic arts and verbal arts and projecting on the paradoxical

arguments on the idea of immortality through art, the poem is also well-known as an

ekphrastic poem. Indeed, if W. H. Auden‘s ―Museé des Beaux Arts‖ is the most

acknowledged poem as far as ekphrasis in English poetry is concerned, Keats‘s ode

is the close second.

Thanks to the key development of the second phase of ekphrasis, the opening of

public museums, English poetry has come up with a remarkable poem as ―Grecian

Urn.‖ It is known that Keats enjoyed visiting museums as he enjoyed nature walks

like other Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Byron (Motion 389; Jack 217;

Vogler 17). In writing ―Grecian Urn,‖ Keats was inspired from a classical collection

in the British Museum. The collection was probably the Elgin collection (also known

as the Elgin marbles since all pieces were donated by Lord Elgin)32

which consisted

of vases and marbles from ancient Greece (McGann 43; Jack 218-219; Motion 390-

401; Broomwich 247)33

. In fact, Keats was carried away with the beauty of these

31 Referred to as ―Grecian Urn‖ (not as ―Ode‖) henceforth in order to avoid confusion with odes like ―Ode to a

Nightingale.‖ 32 Lord Elgin bequeathed his collection of Greek vases first in 1772. This was followed by a larger amount of

donation of marbles, urns, statues, and other artefacts in 1816 (McGann 44-45). 33 Jack believes that the source of inspiration for Keats was a combination of neo-Attic vases, Elgin marbles, and

Renaissance and post-Renaissance paintings from Claude and Poussin (217-219). Broomwich, on the other hand,

is certain that the first version of Keats‘s poem is composed shortly after seeing a Greek vase in 1817 (247-248).

209

works so much that he rendered an engraving of a Greek vase to accompany his

collection34

.

As in Keats‘s other museum poems like ―On Seeing the Elgin Marbles‖ and ―Ode on

Indolence,‖ ―Grecian Urn‖ represents and celebrates ―…a perfect and complete idea

of The Beautiful‖ (McGann 44). To be more precise, he actually revisits an ancient

ekphrastic method introduced by Theocritus by making use of handcrafted objects35

.

―Grecian Urn‖ is primarily a notional ekphrastic poem due to its unknown target

objet d’art; it is not a representation of an exact painting ―recollected in tranquility‖

or a reproduction of a sight or vision as in Wordsworth and it leaves little space for

the ―memory discussion‖ of Romanticism. In this respect, Scott believes the poem to

be a representation of ―the new vogue of ekphrastic poetry‖ by referring to its

museum-based background (Scott viii). As in many of his poems, Keats deals with

nature, mythology, love, human condition and arts in the poem (Vogler 17; Keats

xviii). In short, as it is going to be explained in the following paragraphs, it is a poem

extending ―personal experience to describe a general truth‖ (Motion 403).

Because ―Grecian Urn‖ is a notional piece, it is not possible to talk about the

connections of a target object as it was in Jonson or Wordsworth. Instead, it is

necessary to deal with the content, artistic arguments and philosophical assumptions

in the poem since ―Grecian Urn‖ is a significant work giving clues about the

ekphrastic developments in the nineteenth century, which will be effectual on the

34 See Illustration II.x. It is probable that the engraving was a reproduction of the Sosibios Vase in the British

Museum (Motion 490). 35 Theocritus often referred to carved wooden cups and vases offered as rewards for musico-poetic achievement

in Greek and Roman pastoral poetry (Hollander 9). In his first idyll, for instance, the shepherd Thrysis is offered

an ivy wooden cup for his lyric success (Theocritus 11. 29-59).

210

development of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite notions on arts36

. Therefore, instead of

focusing on particular stanzas or sections, it is beneficial to study the poem as a

whole as far as the tradition is concerned in order to see the general idea the poem

presents37

.

The poem is a celebration of the undying images on an antique urn. Neither the

chasing lovers nor the trees have died away on the urn because the images are

captured in time and space; this is also why the lovers can never kiss and the trees are

evergreen. Considering the continuity of the ―deep frozen‖ action on the urn, the

poem brings to mind the idea of immortality through works of art. As Shakespeare

keeps fresh both his works (as his poetry ―…may still shine bright‖ ―…in black ink‖

―Sonnet 65,‖ 1-2) and his beloved (as in ―So long lives this, and this gives life to

thee‖ ―Sonnet 18,‖ 14) through poetry, Keats tries to immortalise ―a scene full of

flashing light, color, movement and music caught in a moment of ceremony and

communal worship‖ (Sperry 38). So, the influence of the opening of museums is

observed in two levels: firstly the museum has inspired the poet to contemplate on

the urn. Secondly and more fundamentally, the poem reflects the idea of the

preservation of works of art that was initiated by the institutionalised collections. As

the museums took away the common belief that works of plastic arts are bound to

perish, the poem, too, brings about a sense of preservation of the fleeting moment

that is temporally and spatially ―arrest[ing] action into story‖ (Heffernan 109).

36 For instance, the same thematical background is observed in Elizabeth Barrett Browning‘s ―Hiram Powers‘

Greek Slave.‖ 37 See Appendix VIII for the full-text of ―Grecian Urn.‖

211

Technically the poem consists of five stanzas with ten lines in each rhyming as abab.

The diction sounds archaic, especially in the first and last stanzas that echo the

exclamatory and elegant ode style of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Parker

114). However, the technical aspects of the poem like meter and rhyme scheme do

not bring out much about the ekphrastic qualities of the poem. The most striking

feature of ―Grecian Urn‖ is its exceedingly deviational structure and the paradoxical

―interplay between arts‖ (Ricks 158). The contradictory synthesis is clearly not a

coincidence; it is apparent that Keats, who had edited the poem three times before its

publication, wanted the poem to look paradoxical and stylistically mid-stirring

(Motion 410; Parker 104). In fact, the paradoxes are formed in such a way that they

seem like moving in a ―striking balance‖ and in successive parallelisms and

repetitions (Motion 401). The deliberate negation is observed in every level of the

poem as in the frequent uses of oxymoron, anaphora, and parataxical structures like

synonymy:

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

…

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

(1-2, 9-10).

The relationship between mobility and immobility, as seen in the conflict between

―quietness,‖ ―silence,‖ ―slow time,‖ ―ecstasy‖ and ―pursuit,‖ ―escape,‖ is very

obvious. The opening stanza, which also introduces the urn to the readers, begins

with the activity-passivity conflict, but as the poem progresses this paradox is carried

into a more complex structure. While the second, third, and fourth stanzas depict the

212

topography depicted on the urn, the paradox develops to become a tricky dispute on

the idea of immortality that will not be resolved in the last stanza, where the paradox

reaches the climax. In other words, just as in the ten unanswered questions, Keats

does not offer a solution or an explanation to the much debated quote ―‗Beauty is

truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know‘,‖

which is at the heart of ―immortality through art‖ problem (49-50). However, before

studying the importance and function of the last two lines, it is necessary to cover

some of the essential points that might help comprehending the paradoxical diction

of the poem.

Resonating Homer and Dante, Keats makes use of the phonolexical quality of

English language. However, the sounds in the poem are paradoxically ―unheard;‖

Keats, unlike omniaudivi Homer, is deaf just as Wordsworth‘s peaceful sea. Keats

compresses these sound effects by presenting them in a contradictory way; the nouns

like ―quietness‖ and ―silence,‖ (as well as adjectives, verbs, and phrases like

―unheard,‖ ―silent‖ (twice), and ―no tone‖) are clearly opposed to words and phrases

like ―melody,‖ ―pipe[s][-ing]‖ (five times), ―song‖ (three times), ―play on,‖ ―sensual

ear,‖ ―hear,‖ ―melodist,‖ ―tongue,‖ ―tell,‖ and ―say.‖ The speech and sound

contradiction is also repeated in ability-inability relationship but in a deviational

style. As opposed to the lively diction, the poem contains direct references to

inactivity and incapability such as ―still,‖ ―slow time,‖ ―remain,‖ and ―ecstasy.‖ The

sense of inability is clearer in the use of modal ―can‖ in the forms of ―can‘t,‖

―cannot,‖ ―cans‘t,‖ and ―(n)ever can‖ that occur six times in the poem:

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Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;

…

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

(15-20)38

.

A similar case is observed in the anaphorical use of ―(n)ever,‖ which also occurs six

times, and ―forever,‖ which occurs five times in a repetitive manner:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

…

Forever piping songs forever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,

Forever panting, and forever young;

(17, 24-27)39

.

The ―unheard‖ melodies, lovers, and the background (the sea, sky, mountains,

flowers, trees and towns) are presented in repetitive comparatives as in ―Heard

melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play

on‖ (11-12) or in ―More happy love! more happy, happy love!‖ (25). Parallel

repetitive patterns are exemplified in rhetorical questions:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

…

38 Emphasis added. 39 Emphasis added.

214

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

(4-10; 41-47).

The rivalry between the verbal and the visual is almost climactic in the poem because

this time they are not simply fighting for spatial dominance on the page but for

temporal maintenance and permanence. On one hand Keats celebrates the durability

of the urn as a work of art and on the other he mourns for the passivity of the images

on the urn, which forms the crucial paradox in the poem. Although Parker believes

that it is the urn, as the embodiment of the visual, which is victorious in the battle of

temporality (113), the stillness in the poem is so prevailing that it cannot be

disregarded. On the lexical level, passivity is ever present; for instance, the poem

opens with the urn labelled as the ―still unravished bride of quietness‖ (1) and ends

with the final image of the urn as the ―silent form… / Cold Pastoral!‖ (44-45).

Similarly and more significantly, the urn, which seems to offer an atmosphere ―more

sweetly than our rhyme‖ (4), Keats does not let it speak or make sounds. In other

words, the urn, the unique addressee of the poet, is mute and cannot answer any of

the questions asked nor can it comment on what Keats has to say. Besides there is not

any sign of an attached epigram or carved writing on the urn. In this case, just as the

tongue-pierced Philomela or ravished tapestry of Arachne, the urn is suppressed by

the gaze and becomes a she-urn under the ―male authority‖ (Mitchell ―Ekphrasis‖

699; Scott 34). Keats, as the poetic persona, then, locks the urn into a lonely

―changelessness‖ thus making it remain as the ―gazed‖ to the eternity; as the male

215

gaze watches the urn as if watching television, the urn is bound to relate the same

story over and over (Heffernan 112-113).

As for the last two lines, which have also been adopted as the title of this chapter, the

paradoxical nature of the poem still rules. Much has been discussed on the meaning

of these lines. Robert Bridges has commented that ―because of its unchanging

expression of perfect; and this is true and beautiful… [although] its amplification in

the poem is unprogressive, monotonous, and scattered (qtd. in Murry 210). Eliot‘s

remark is more down-to-earth: ―I am at first included to agree ... But on re-reading

the whole Ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the

reason must be either that I fail to understand it or that it is wrong…‖ (―Dante‖ 230-

231). Other critics from the New Critical and modernist schools like Cleanth Brooks

and M.H. Abrams have agreed the couplet to be a rhetorical statement since beauty

usually brings out truth and the vice versa (Rylance 730). More recent criticism,

however, focuses on the intellectual background of the nineteenth century (ibid. 730-

731). In my opinion, the couplet in quotation marks should be read as a

straightforward synopsis of the paradoxical poem40

. ―Beauty is truth, truth beauty‖ is

a circular statement that summarises the contradictory condition of the urn. It is in

quotation marks because now it is Keats speaking out loud. Having pitied the time-

captivated urn, he talks to the urn before he leaves it in the silence of the museum

and piteously says ―…that is all / ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.‖ The

pronoun ―it‖ refers to the rest of the poem, then, where Keats explains the state of the

mute urn. So, knowing that beauty is truth and vice versa is the only thing the urn

40 As opposed to this idea, Heffernan believes the statement to be an iconophillic expression displaying the rivalry

between the verbal and the visual (Heffernan 113-4)

216

knows and this is more than enough. In other words, the urn, which never responds

throughout, is obliged to listen to Keats and take his advice.

For Kermode, Keats is the ―first to achieve in English a characteristic poetic

statement of the joy at the cost of the image‖ (10). Indeed, as the ―least political of all

Romantics,‖ Keats avoids exaggerated statements or references as he focuses on the

artistic qualities of the urn though the urn is notional (Heffernan 93). As observed in

the above paragraphs, Keats, under the influence of the developments in the second

phase of ekphrasis, has initiated the new understanding of immortality through art.

Aware of the conflicting notion and the paradoxical arguments it brings out, he is

troubled to make a decision between pacified immortality and dynamic temporality:

Traditionally… ekphrasis is dynamic and obstetric, delivering from the

pregnant moment of visual art the extended narrative which it

embryonically signifies. Keats‘s poem simultaneously excites and

frustrates the narrative urge (Heffernan 113).

The handling of this delicate matter in a mind-stirring way is rather original.

Previous examples of ekphrasis usually took sides, either with the verbal or with the

visual. However, as museums changed the reception and the value of the visual arts,

the debate won a new direction. Therefore Keats‘s method is not simply to discuss

the debate on conventional paragonal grounds. Subsequently, it is necessary to state

that Keats‘s paradoxical way of dealing with the nineteenth-century notion of arts

has been influential on the next generation of poets as it is going to be seen in Auden

and Ashbery.

217

4.4. Shelley: The Medusa Paradox

Shelley‘s journey to Italy in 1818 brought him to Florence, once the intellectual

centre of the Italian and continental Renaissance. The city has influenced him to a

great extend. On 20 August, he writes to Mrs. Shelley:

As we approached Florence, the country became cultivated to a very high

degree, the plain was filled with the most beautiful villas, and, as far as

the eye could reach, the mountains were covered with them; for the

plains are bounded on all sides by blue and misty mountains. The vines

are here trailed on low trellises of reeds, interwoven (qtd. in McMahan

13).

As he walked about the city through its historical and artistic treasures, he came to

admire the Florence more. This is when he wrote his ekphrastic poem ―On the

Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery‖41

after his visit to the Uffizi

Gallery. Among other Medusa paintings in the Gallery, Shelley chose to compose on

what he was told to be da Vinci‘s, which makes the poem an example of actual

ekphrastic (Rogers 12). Until the mid-twentieth century the painting was attributed to

da Vinci when it changed hands to belong to an unknown Flemish painter of the late

sixteenth century (See Illustrations II.xi. and II.xii)42

. Therefore, it is an honest

mistake of Shelley to attribute the painting to da Vinci. Besides Shelley is not the

first to compose on the painting or on Medusa in general but his poem has become an

established work since it gathers the contextual and technical qualities of other

41 Referred to as ―On the Medusa‖ henceforth. 42 There are two essential Medusa paintings in the gallery. One of them (Illustration II.xii.) belongs to Caravaggio

while the other, which was once thought to be da Vinci‘s, belongs to an anonymous Flemish painter (Illustration

II.xi.) (Hollander The Gazer’s 144; Rogers 14). It is the latter painting Shelley ekphrasizes on. After the first

speculations in the early twentieth century, the painting, which was in the Uffizi collection since 1631, was

attributed to da Vinci but in the 1960s the painting came to be regarded as anonymously Flemish (Hollander ―The

Poetics‖ 211; Rogers 119). There are some other speculations claiming that the painting could be a copy of a lost

original by da Vinci (Hollander The Gazer’s 144).

218

Medusa paintings and the Romantic ekphrasis43

. As it is going to be explicated in the

following sections, ―On the Medusa‖ reveals Shelley‘s own poetic tendencies

culminated with the Romantic convention to merge the image into words along with

the paragonal norms of the nineteenth century.

The poem is divided (and numbered) into five stanzas with eight lines in each.44

Each

octave follows rime royale with ababaacc scheme. Moving between meditating on

the Gorgonian and describing the painting (and Medusa), the poem seems closer to

meditative ekphrasis45

. In terms of contextual framework, the poem focuses on

particular sections of the painting. The first octave concentrates on the eyelids and

the eyes, ―gazing on the midnight sky,‖ while the second stanza deals with the head

of Medusa. The third and fourth stanzas are on the ―serpent-locks‖ and the objects

(stones and serpents) surrounding the head. The final stanza returns to Medusa and

her eyes ―gazing in death.‖ In other words the poem opens and closes with the

Gorgonian eyes and the looks: ―It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky… / …Gazing in

death on heaven from those wet rocks‖ (1, 40). Indeed the poem is in line with the

primary literal focus of the painting: the head of the mortal Gorgonian. Just like the

43 One of the other well-known examples composed on the painting is Cavaliere (Giambattista) Marino‘s poem

entitled ―Head of the Medusa in the Palace Gallery of the Grand Duke of Tuscany‖ (in his small book Galleria

Distinta) in which the Duke of Tuscany, whose shield bears a reproduction of the painting, is celebrated

(Friedlaender 88; Hollander The Gazer’s 145). Marino‘s poem is composed on the same anonymous painting as

was Shelley‘s. William Drummond of Hawthornden‘s epigram ―The Statue of Medusa‖ was probably composed

after Caravaggio‘s version (Hollander The Gazer’s 146). Ovid, too, had left space for Medusa, whose ―lovely hair

[turned] to loathsome snakes… / …for fitting punishment transformed‖ (4.799, 802). 44 See Appendix IX to read the full-text of the poem. Hollander mentions a final stanza the originality of which is

uncertain found in the 1959 edition of Shelley’s Poems by Neville Rogers. This stanza has also been added to

Appendix IX. However the analysis of the poem sticks to the canonized five stanzas. 45 The poem is one of the hardest ekphrastic poems to categorize. While the first, second and last stanzas

contemplate on the state of Medusa in general, the third and fourth stanzas focus on the surrounding images

observed on the painting. In fact, in almost each stanza, the mimetic and the meditative are intermingled and it is

hard to divide and study them syntactically and lexically. Shelley is loyal to the painting except for the mountains

in the first stanza, which are not visible in the painting; it is probable that Shelley recalls the details of the myth

and refers to them at this point (Hollander The Gazer’s 145). All in all, the poem is more likely to be a piece of

meditative ekphrasis though the imitative and the inspirational encounter frequently.

219

painting itself, the poem is centralised around Medusa‘s bodiless head and looks. The

accompanying creatures such as snakes, lizards, toads, reptiles, and bats are used to

complete the picture and none of these creatures refer to the good46

. From this point

of view, too, the poem and the painting are analogous. The dark atmosphere of the

painting indicated by dark colours, vague and black background and the gloomy

perspective have been reflected in the poem as serpents. The same point is observed

on lexical level. The vocabulary is harsh, disturbing, and terrifying as in: ―horror,‖

―terror,‖ ―fiery,‖ ―tremblingly,‖ ―death‖ (three times), ―ragged jaw,‖ ―pain,‖

―stone… [and] rock(s)‖ (four times), ―torture‖ and the like.

Syntactically Shelley‘s poem differs from the monotonous nouny style of

Wordsworth and Keats. There are only five gerund structures like ―gazing‖ and

―struggling‖ but the diction is still highly dynamic and fluid. Contradicting with the

head that ―…lieth, gazing on the midnight sky‖ impotently, the poem is energised

with verbs of action like ―grow,‖ ―flow,‖ ―flit,‖ ―trace,‖ and ―come.‖ In fact, with its

thirty-six verbs of action (not mentioning the adjective and adverb forms like

―thrilling vapour‖ and ―tremblingly‖), only thirteen lines (out of forty) in the poem

lack a verb of action:

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft

Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;

Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise

Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,

46 The snake could be an exception for it is regarded as the symbol of medicine and health. After Perseus kills

Medusa, Athena shows up and takes two drops from the bleeding head and the snakes to give them to

Erichthonius; one was a curing medicine and the other was a deadly poison (Ovid 4.770-795).

220

And he comes hastening like a moth that hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

(25-31)47

.

The foregrounded dynamism created by the verbs of action seems to be paradoxical.

Unlike Keats and Wordsworth, who try to slow down the syntactical rhythm of their

works in accordance with the target objects, Shelley provides a kind of poetic

enthusiasm. This paradox is also seen in the oxymoronic uses that provide and

prevent motion at the same time like ―peep[ing] idly,‖ ―l[ying]… gazing,‖ ―beauty…

terror,‖ ―dead face… graven… characters be grown,‖ and ―unending involution.‖

However, there is a point that needs attention. Both target images Wordsworth and

Keats addressed contained action: Wordsworth‘s castle was stormy place trembling

with waves while Keats‘s urn represented chasing lovers and playing pipes. Shelley‘s

image, on the other hand, is already dead. The head is cut off, the mouth is only

reflexively open, the eyes are stale and the nature is silent. In other words, Shelley

probably did not need to stabilise an already pale and stable painting that offered no

action or dynamism. A similar case is also found in ―Ozymandias,‖ where the king

Ozymandias and his ―trunkless legs of stone48

‖ are already dead and destroyed (2)49

.

The despotic arrogance of the king has already been forced to meet the levelling

effects of time that have left him defenceless and incapable; in other words,

Ozymandias, as the personification of the kingly arrogance, is harmless (qtd. in

Heffernan 118). In ―Ozymandias,‖ therefore, Shelley is pitiful; he leaves some space

47 Emphasis added. 48 Shelley‘s ―Ozymandias‖ may not be totally notional since it is probably a depiction of a statue of Ramses II he

saw in Diodorus Siculus‘s book (first century AD). The book was displayed in the British Museum in its early

days after it was brough to London (Freedman 63-4). 49 It may be useful to keep in mind that ―Ozymandias,‖ first published in January 1818 in liberal journal

Examiner, was an occasional poem on British politics criticising the celebrations of the victory of Duke of

Wellington at Waterloo held at the Statue of the Duke in Hyde Park (Heffernan 116).

221

for the already silenced image to speak because he knows that there is no need to

―despair‖ Ozymandias, whose ―passions‖ are well-read by its sculptor (11, 6). In

other words, as the poem suggests, Ozymandias‘s challenging call, ―My name is

Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" goes to

waste (―Ozymandias‖ 10-11)50

. Similarly, the beheaded Medusa is also a safe image

and a dynamic diction will not overpower the verbal poem. Besides Shelley‘s

inclination with the idea that the verbal arts (especially poetry) is above all arts is

well-known (Uzundemir 7). At this point, Shelley‘s ―Defence of Poetry,‖ written in

the Renaissance apology manner is worth remembering:

Poetry is the record of the happiest and best moments and best minds… it

exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to

that which is most deformed… It transmutates all that it touches and

every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by

wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes… It

strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and

sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms… Poetry is indeed

something divine… Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the

divinity in man… It is at once the centre and circumference of

knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which

all science must be referred… (951-956)51

.

Shelley, therefore, like Wordsworth, considers objet d’art only spatially and not as

an artistic act over poetry (Simonsen 6). Although, in some of his other poems, he

offers powerful examples of enargeia, or in Burwick‘ words ―prophetic images… of

the future,‖ he still gives the palms to poetry (151).

50 As far as ekphrasis is concerned, the verbal construct in the poem is essential. The inscription in the sestet of

the sonnet displays another kind of paragonal relationship. Inserting the verbal in the work of art could be

regarded as a violation of the ergon; in this way the parergon both dominates and leaves its trace (as Derrida

would call) on the image. Along with the prosopopeial feature (the traveller, the poetic persona, and the king in

the poem), the verbal-within-the-visual makes ―Ozymandias‖ a genuinely ekphrastic poem. However, due to lack

of space, the major concerns of the study will focus on ―On the Medusa‖. 51 Emphasis added.

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One final point about the poem that needs attention is the paradoxical problem of

gazing. As the painting and the opening of the poem suggest, ―On the Medusa‖ is a

poem on gazing, or ―un-gazing.‖ The lexical parallelism based on verbs related to the

act of looking like ―gaze,‖ ―peep,‖ and ―look‖ occur for fourteen times in the poem,

not mentioning the other related words like ―eye,‖ ―eyelid,‖ ―radiance,‖ or ―mirror.‖

Critics like Hollander and Mitchell have asked questions about the identity of the

―gazer‖ (or ―gazing‖) problem52

. According to one view, the gazer is the newly slain

Medusa, the only mortal Gorgonian sister; this point of view is based on the painting.

Another claim takes the reader as the gazer and this ―readerly‖ claim focuses on the

poem from a distance. The idea that the actual gazer is the poet is also common

(Hollander ―The Poetics‖ 211). Mitchell, on the other hand, believes that the gazer is

Perseus, the victorious avenger, and that the poem is basically a monologue of

Perseus (―Ekphrasis‖ 709; Hollander 145). Moving on from this point, Mitchell

develops his hypothesis that there is a unique paragonal relationship (ibid. 709-710).

For him, there is a shift of the identity of the gazer, from Perseus, describing Medusa

to readers as ―it lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,‖ to the reader-viewer, who scans

the painting in the third and fourth stanzas. Heffernan, too, believes that the poem is

an unsolvable riddle of paragonal relationship between the painting and the poem,

the poet and the painting, Perseus and Medusa, and finally the reader and the viewer

(121-122; Hollander 145). Indeed, considering the complex gazing-looking

relationship between the gazing Medusa, who turns his ―gazers‖ into stone (as the

poet and reader-viewers are carried away and amazed by the image on the

52 These questions have been so essential for Hollander that the line ―turns the gazer‘s spirit into stone‖ has given

him the title of his book, Gazer’s Spirit (10).

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painting)53

, and the gazing Perseus, who uses a shield to mirror the looks of the

Gorgonian (and kills her by turning her looks back to herself), ―On the Medusa‖ is a

highly paragonal poem that forces the limits of ergon-parergon contradiction54

.

The Gazers

(Ergon / Master)

The Gazed object

(Parergon / Subject)

Shelley the poet The actual anonymous painting (Medusa)

Reader The image ekphrasized in the poem (Medusa)

Reader-viewer The painting and the poem

The poet persona Medusa image

Perseus Medusa

Medusa Perseus

Medusa Medusa (her reflection on Perseus‘s shield)

Medusa Viewer

Figure IV. Relationship between the gazer and the gazed in Shelley’s “On the Medusa”

The debate over the gazer has also reached to a point where the ancient Philomela

myth was revitalised. While Freud, in his posthumously published Das

Medusenhaupt (Medusa's Head), calls the slaying of Medusa an act of castration,

Seelig calls it an act of rape (Seelig 895). As the torn-out tapestry of Arachne or the

mistreated Philomela, Medusa‘s head could be referred to as a kind of ―rape‖ only in

that it silences the Gorgonian. In this context, as far as the painting is concerned,

Medusa has been raped twice, both by Perseus and by the unknown Flemish painter.

Moreover, as in the cases of Arachne (being watched by other girls in her village)

and Lucrece (monitored by the eyes of the images of the Trojan War), readers

become viewers (or ―peep[ers]‖) of this act. In any case, regarding the painting and

53 Hollander suggests that the nineteenth-century usage of the word ―gaze‖ was very similar to the verb ―look‖ of

our time; it was used both as a transitive verb as ―gaze [at]‖ or as a noun ―gaze‖ (look, appearence) (145; OED). 54 See Figure IV.

224

the Medusa‘s image on the canvas would end up with parallel paragonal assumptions

for Shelley: the dominance of the poetry.

To sum up, ―On the Medusa‖ provides enough evidence to place itself among the

Romantic line of ekphrasis in the second phase. Focusing on the paragone, mutual

gazing relationships, and depicting and contemplating on the painting at the same

time, Shelley has strengthened the qualities of (actual) ekphrasis, which has begun to

be more influential in the literary canon. Shelley‘s influence on future poets like

Browning and Auden will be observed almost with the same ekphrastic

characteristics in the proceeding sections.

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4.5. The Victorian Age and the Pre-Raphaelites

The Victorian age brought about new developments both on socio-cultural, political,

and scientific levels. In arts, new tendencies were beginning to attract artists.

Especially visual arts was experiencing a time of revision and artistic leap as the

formerly favoured didactic and purely descriptive moods were being replaced with

aesthetic concerns (Uzundemir 7, 9). Particularly painting, after the establishment of

public museums, was regarded in a different context. As painters and their work

secured a more central space in the art circles, different ideas considering the

aesthetic value and function of visual arts began to be discussed. Merleau-Ponty

states that the boundaries between arts melted down due to the new understanding of

visual depth and perception during this period (254)55

. The Romantic rejection of the

stylish became the artistic ―mode,‖ a nineteenth-century ―concept of theory of

painting‖ (Marin Sublime 189)56

. Besides theorists like Burke, Kant, Schelling, and

Schiller, who were also influential on the Romantic world-view and philosophy,

were re-interpreted to substantiate the l’art pour l’art notion (Burwick 18; Graham

472).

55 Merleau-Ponty believes that particularly the idea of new aesthetic depth is very essential in the development of

painting as a genuinely liberal art free from the verbal constrains. Basing his argument on Berkeley‘s theory of

artistic depth, he states that there is a dual and reciprocal relationship between time and space and that it is the

artistic depth that combines this relationship:

Traditional ideas of perception are at one in denying that depth is visible. Berkeley shows that it

could not be given to sight in the absence of any means of recording it, since our retinas receive

only a manifestly flat projection of the spectacle… Berkeley‘s argument, made quite explicit, runs

roughly like this. What I call depth is in reality a juxtaposition of points, making it comparable to

breadth. I am simply badly placed to see it… The depth which is declared invisible is, therefore, a

depth already identified with breadth and, this being the case, the argument would lack even a

semblance of consistency (Merleau-Ponty 254-6). 56 Original emphasis.

226

The result of these developments was an important shift in the conception of art. At

the heart of this shift was a rupture; now visual arts parted themselves from sciences,

philosophy, and literature and regarded themselves distinctly different from other

creative activities of man. It was believed that ―a work of art never aims at deluding

the spectator into thinking that he has the real object before him,‖ which reflected the

notion that a work of art was a unique entity in itself on grounds of its existence and

aestheticism (Burwick 67, 108). In painting the image on the canvas began to be

regarded as an artistic representation filtered through the imaginative mind of the

artist thus paintings turned out to be aesthetic re-creations of their target objects. The

conceptual separation of the object and objet d’art is an essential development in

terms of ekphrasis. Visual arts that secured themselves as immortal representations in

the museums gained more autonomy by freeing themselves from other fields of art

and science. Mitchell believes that the development in visual arts in the late

nineteenth century is the reason behind what he calls ekphrastic entrapment57

, or the

offensive state or pressure the visual causes the viewer-writer to get precautionary,

which could be observed in the tactful manners of the poetic persona in Browning‘s

―My Last Duchess‖ (Picture 110).

In England, the Victorian age, as the age of alteration, gave birth to a movement

reacting against the cliché dogmas of previous centuries in visual arts. Founded by a

group of young artists and intellectuals, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an

avant-garde artistic group protesting the mechanic and stylish approach of the

Mannerist art that was under the influence of Raphael and Michalengelo (Barringer

57 Also called ekphrastic fear (Mitchell Picture 111; ―Ekphrasis‖ 699).

227

21). Criticising the fake poses and unrealistic exaggerations of the visual arts after

Raphael, Pre-Raphaelites, as their name suggests, aimed to reform art by putting the

emphasis on pictorial details, realistic (almost naturalistic) poses, the medieval and

the archaic, and individual creativity of the artist used by painters preceeding

Raphael and his time. Initiated by painters like William Holman Hunt, John Everett

Millais, and James Collinson, the Brotherhood was a reaction in painting against the

high Renaissance standards of the Royal Academy and among the founders of the

group, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was the only poet (Gaunt 33-43; Lottes 253)58

.

Therefore, as opposed to the general point of view, the Pre-Raphaelites were initially

influential on painting though the Germ, a literary magazine edited by D.G. Rosetti‘s

brother William Rosetti, contained essays attempting to carry the reform in painting

into poetry59

. The theorems and assumptions of the group were also supported by

John Ruskin, who defended ―the primal inspiration‖ in arts (335). However, the

group began to part in the mid-1850s due to various reasons such as the modern-

medieval debate and personal problems (Barringer 110).

With regards to ekphrasis, the Pre-Raphaelite movement is an essential development.

Especially through the poetry and paintings of painter-poet D.G. Rosetti, the second

phase of ekphrasis completes itself. Even though the Victorian age seems to be a

totally disparate period that needs to be studied in a different chapter and context, a

closer look shows that neither D.G. Rosetti‘s poetry nor the late nineteenth-century

artistic notions can be separated from the preceding Romantic tendencies as far as the

58 Thomas Woolner also had some published poems however he was primarily a sculptor (Gaunt 23). Other poets

like Christina Rosetti and C.A. Swinburne were not official members of the brotherhood. 59 However, the Germ was only published for five months, from January (1850) to April (Barringer 50; Gaunt

12).

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ekphrastic tradition and poetic tendencies are concerned. It is important to remember

that there is only a time span of fifty years between the first publication of Lyrical

Ballads (1798), the cornerstone of Romantic poetic dictum, and the foundation of the

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. So, regarding the characteristics of the second

phase of ekphrasis, it is liable to assume that there is little difference between the

Romantic ekphrasis and the ekphrastic works of D.G. Rosetti. Indeed, the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood and its doctrines were inspired by Hunt‘s (ekphrastic)

painting The Eve of St.Agnes, inspired from Keats‘s poem with the same title

(Prettejohn 159). The encounter between the visual and the verbal was encouraged

and, as in the case of Blake, they experienced close contact with one another because

―painting is properly opposed to speaking or writing, but not to poetry‖ (qtd. in

Landow 1)60

. As poetry was still under the influence of the later Romantics such as

Keats and Shelley, the Pre-Raphaelite poetry maintained its close relation to the

picturesque culminated with Romantic imagination, memory, and creativity (Graham

470-474). Besides, the importance given to individuality in the Romantic age

reflected in the idiosyncratic utterances of the wandering nature poet was observed in

Browning‘s monologues in the Victorian age. Subsequently, in many aspects, the

major characteristics of the second phase of ekphrasis were carried on in the

nineteenth century. From its pictorial quality to individuality, from the close visual-

verbal relationship to the paragonal battle, the nineteenth-century poet was loyal to

almost every aspect of the Romantic poetic reform with regards to ekphrasis.

60 See Chapter I for further references to Ruskin, the Victorian idea of ekphrasis, and the full-version of this

citation.

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4.6. Titian’s “Venetian,” Rosetti’s “Giorgone”

Dante Gabriel Rosetti resembles Blake in that both artists were painters and poets

who rejected the conventions of the eloquent and elaborate poetic modes of their

predecessors. Like Blake, Rosetti, too grew up with works of visual arts. He was

only four years old when the National Gallery opened in 1824 but his adolescence

passed wandering around the aisles of the gallery (Ash 20-21). However, unlike the

self-educated Blake, Rosetti was educated to be a painter, first at Henry Sass‘s

Drawing Academy and then at the Royal Academy of Arts (Prettejohn 93).

Rosetti‘s interest in medieval and early Renaissance works of art is well-known; he

admired Boticelli, Titian, and tales of King Arthur while he also tried to imitate their

styles in painting. As a poet, he followed Keats, who was little-known in the 1850s,

and like Keats he was a gallery lover (Ash 21). Unfortunately and unlike other poets

who had been associated with the Pre-Raphaelites like C.A. Swinburne, Rosetti has

never been to Italy to see the masters he loved. Italy was the place that owned the

majority of Rosetti‘s favourites and all he could do was to collect photos of the

galleries like the Uffizi (Lottes 239, 254)61

. For him, the early Italian Renaissance

was ―an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized and complete‖

(Pater 31); so at this point he agreed with John Ruskin, who had supported the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood, and believed in the idea that the manner of the early

Renaissance masters should be revitalised (Lottes 253)62

.

61 John Addington Symonds‘s Renaissance in Italy (especially his chapter on Boticelli in Vol. 3) (1877) and his

friend Edward Burne-Jones‘s pamphlets on Boticelli provide the chief sources for Rosetti‘s Italian material

(Lottes 251; 256). 62 Although Ruskin celebrated Rosetti‘s work and defended the principles of the Brotherhood, Rosetti was against

Ruskin‘s religious preoccupations and moralist views (Lottes 247, 251-253).

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Rosetti used ekphrasis in both ways: as a painter, he painted from Bible, Dante,

Keats, and Morte D’Arthur while as a poet he composed on Boticelli, Giorgone, and

even his own paintings as in ―Lilith‖ and ―Found‖ (Hollander 48-50). Among his

well-known ekphrastic poems like ―For ‗Our Lady of the Rocks‘ by Leonardo da

Vinci,‖ ―For Spring by Sandro Boticelli,‖ and ―Lilith,‖ one poem stands out with its

stylistic and ekphrastic characteristics that provides important clues about Rosetti

both as a poet and a painter63

. ―For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgone in the Louvre64

,‖

first published in the Germ in 1850, is a sonnet composed after Rosetti‘s encounter

with Titian‘s Le Concert Champêtre (The Pastoral Concert) in the Louvre (See

Illustration II.xiii.). As in the case of Shelley, Rosetti was blameless to confuse the

painting to be a work of Giorgone since the painting was attributed to Giorgone,

rather than Titian, until the late twentieth century (Hollander 157; ―For A Venetian

Pastoral: Scholarly Commentary‖).

―For a Venetian Pastoral‖ is a sonnet which lacks a regular rhyme scheme and

measure apart from the iambic feet it recklessly follows; it is probable that Rosetti

wanted to make the poem spontaneous as in ―Lilith‖ and ―For ‗Our Lady of the

Rocks‘ by Leonardo da Vinci.‖ However, such an assumption only holds true as far

as the poetic metrics is concerned. Indeed, the poem is a re-reading of the painting in

a manner similar to Jonson‘s. A closer inspection reveals that Rosetti almost scans

the painting from one end to another like a copying machine. Although the poem is

63 It is useful to remember that Rosetti composed a series of poems (primarily sonnets) on paintings from his

favourite painters or on his own paintings under the title Sonnets for Pictures. Among the major poems from

these twenty-six lyrics are ―For ‗Our Lady of the Rocks‘ by Leonardo da Vinci,‖ ―For an Allegorical Dance of

Women by Andrea Mantegna,‖ ―For ‗Ruggeiro and Angelica‘ by Ingres,‖ ―For ‗The Wine of Circe‘ by Edward

Burne-Jones,‖ ―Mary‘s Girlhood: for a Picture,‖ and ―‗The Holy Family‘ by Michalengelo in the National

Gallery.‖ 64 Referred to as ―For a Venetian Pastoral‖ henceforth. The full-text version of the poem has been provided in

Appendix X.

231

not divided into sections, it is feasible to talk about five sections, each of which

leaves equal space to the figures on the painting and helps to the formation of

stylistic parallelism65

. The first three lines open with reference to the naked woman

pouring water from a jar:

Water, for anguish of the solstice:—nay,

But dip the vessel slowly,—nay, but lean

And hark how at its verge the wave sighs…

(1-3).

The second section is a reflection of the background, where ―…beyond all depth

away / The heat lies silent at the brink of day‖ (4-5). The third section focuses on the

central images: the two shepherds playing music:

Now the hand trails upon the viol-string

That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,

Sad with the whole of pleasure…

(6-8).

Then the poem moves on to the naked woman at the right-centre of the painting.

Rosetti portrays her, as in the painting, as playing flute seated on the grass. The last

section, which is more ambiguous compared to the previous four, refers to the idea of

immortality. Whether this notion is inspired by the long background-filling trees, the

lonely shepherd (or the sheep on the right end of the painting) is unclear. However, it

is true that, like the painting, the poem seems like fading into perpetuity where the

poet persona (and maybe the figures) touches ―lips with eternity‖ (14).

65 See Illustration II.xiv.

232

Scanning the painting from left to right, ―For a Venetian Pastoral‖ projects an

accurate representation of the images in a mimetic tone though the contemplation on

immortality and focus on speaking-from-within-the painting also make the poem an

example of meditative ekphrasis66

. At this point, the tone and pace of the poem

draws attention because Rosetti‘s scanning is carried away in a peculiar way. Rosetti

deliberately drags his reading:

Water, for anguish of the solstice:—nay,

But dip the vessel slowly,—nay, but lean

And hark how at its verge the wave sighs in

Reluctant. Hush! beyond all depth away

The heat lies silent at the brink of day…

(1-5).

The exclamations like ―Hush,‖ ―hark,‖ and ―nay‖ create a pressure on the reading of

the poem along with the shattered syntax. Added to this, the hyphens, occurring for

four times in the poem, make the reading stumble. He deviates and drifts in terms of

diction by his use of vocabulary that evokes silence and tardiness like ―slowly,‖

―lean[ing],‖ ―sighs,‖ ―reluctant,‖ ―heat,‖ and ―solstice.‖ The only verbs used in these

lines also reflect the heat-worn atmosphere of the painting: ―dip[ping] the vessel

slowly,‖ ―lean[ing],‖ ―wav[ing] sighs,‖ ―hush,‖ and ―the heat ly[ing] silent.‖

However, as the poem moves to the third and fourth sections, it loses much of its

dizziness in the first and second sections that project the leaning woman and the

summer background:

66 A similar idea was put forward by Hollander who thinks that Rosetti ―views the painting as it unfolds‖

although he does not refer to the vertical axes and the seperate sections of the poem (158).

233

Now the hand trails upon the viol-string

That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,

Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither stray

Her eyes now, from whose mouth the slim pipes creep

And leave it pouting, while the shadow‘d grass

Is cool against her naked side? …

(6-11).

Following the foregrounded image of the naked flute player, the shepherds come

next. Although the shepherds are ―sad with the whole of pleasure,‖ they are depicted

in an energetic way. Turning the poem into a new tone, Rosetti begins with an

exclamatory ―Now.‖ This part contains much of the dynamism the poem offers

containing eight verbs of action such as ―leave,‖ ―trail,‖ and ―sing.‖ The same point

is easily observed in the painting; viewers recognise the shepherd‘s hand on the

move (hanging on the air) as he plays the lute: ―Now the hand trails upon the viol-

string‖ (6). The end of the poem, however, contains elements from both paces; verbs

that provided energy to the previous section are now used to slow the tempo:

―say[ing] nothing,‖ ―weep[ing],‖ ―nam[ing],‖ ―be[ing],‖ ―touching:‖

… Let be:—

Say nothing now unto her lest she weep,

Nor name this ever. Be it as it was,—

Life touching lips with Immortality.

(12-14).

The last three lines, then, represent the paradoxical resolution. As the poet lets all go

(or lets the moment fleet into immortality), the diction is also freed through the use

of hyphens and verbs of action, which now evoke dizziness, insouciance, and silence.

234

Rosetti suggests a familiar concept in the poem. Immortality through art, also used

by his favourite poet Keats, is the basic concern of ―For a Venetian Pastroral.‖

Unlike Keats, however, Rosetti is not worried. ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ was a poem

that mourned for the frozen images in a dynamic way. Rosetti, as his tone suggests,

is more relaxed and avoids the troubles of the rushing time. He lets the present flow

as he lets the images enjoy the eternal moment on the painting unlike Keats‘s chasing

lovers. So as the time passes by, the woman will continue to play the flute just as the

shepherd will keep playing in a way comfortable as it was.

Rosetti, who foregrounds the exact details of his source like the title, painter, and the

museum of the painting as the many of the poets of the second phase of ekphrasis,

gives no references to colours except for ―brown faces ceas[ing] to sing‖ (7). The

earlier version of the poem was more colourful; for example the ―shadowed grass‖ in

the present version was ―the green shadowed grass‖ while ―beyond all depth away‖

was ―Blue, and deep away‖ (qtd. in Hollander 158-159). The exclusion of colours

could be regarded as an act of verbal suppression and a stylistic deviation from what

the painting suggests. Besides if one considers the women in the painting as invisible

nymphs like Fehl, the importance given to the invisible in the poem turns the

parergon against ergon67

. Since none of the female images meet the looks of the rest

of the figures, Rosetti works against the painting, thus turning the verbal to an

opposite direction from the painting against the visual intension (and the central

focus) and against what Lessing had once said: ―…there is nothing to compel the

poet to compress his picture into a single woman‖ (23).

67 Philipp Fehl, an art-historian, believes that the female figures are actually invisible images because they are not

recognised by the males around them. They are simply accompanying the shepherds in a moment of joy and

music (154-156).

235

The reliability of the assumptions about the nymphs is open to discussion however

there is an obvious point about the paragonal relationship between the painting and

the poem. Just like the unseen colours, the sounds are also unheard. As opposed to

the audio-perceptible diction of Homer and Virgil, Rosetti is indifferent to the music

being played in the painting; he only provides ―faces ceas[ing] to sing,‖ creeping

pipes, and sighs. All the verbs used adjacent to sense of hearing evoke

motionlessness as in ―cease,‖ ―creep,‖ ―sigh,‖ ―say nothing,‖ and ―hush.‖ In other

words, he interferes between the musically-rich world of the painter and the images

and sustains the music into a verbal silence. Besides, the opening of the poem also

recalls painter poems. As a painter himself, he intrudes the painting in a painterly

manner when he says: ―Water, for anguish of the solstice:—nay, / But dip the vessel

slowly,—nay, but lean / And hark…‖ (1-3). It is as if Rosetti is commenting on the

pose of the figures and reshaping the image in an editorial way. From this point

onwards, the interference with two ―nays‖ and two hyphens could be conceived as an

act of verbal intervention.

Although he may be opposing the visual elements in the painting, Rosetti‘s style

shows that he was well aware of the ekphrastic features of his age. It is clear that he

was familiar with the ekphrastic tendency of visiting museums and commemorating

paintings and painters as observed in the titles of his Sonnets for Pictures. The

silenced music in the poem also shows us that he knew about the audio-ekphrastic

relations on verbal grounds. Rosetti may not be as powerful as the Romantic poets or

as the modern poets of the next generations but he shows the pictorial gallery spirit

236

of ekphrastic tradition by representing the verbal-visual close-up of the nineteenth

century.

237

4.7. Browning: “I Gave Commands”

Robert Browning is remembered with his psychological portraits of abnormal

figures, often handling relationships of couples, through dramatic monologue, a

poetic device usually equated with his poetry68

. Among these poems, ―My Last

Duchess,‖ which displays a ―private struggle‖ from the mouth of a Duke, has a

special place (Tucker 177). Indeed, Browning and ―My Last Duchess69

‖ (and his

dramatic monologues in general) have been more popular than the painter and poet

D.G. Rosetti though Browning usually does not refer to particular paintings70

.

Unlike Browning‘s other poems on paintings such as ―Andrea del Sarto‖ and ―Fra

Lippo Lippi,‖ which have been written four years before Elizabeth Barrett and

Browning eloped to Italy, ―My Last Duchess‖ was composed in Italy. Even though

the poem remains to be notional, it is probable that Browning composed the poem

after his visits to Italian galleries71

. As far as the Duke is concerned, it is assumed

that the possessive Duke in the poem is either Duke Alfonso II, fifth Duke of Ferrara,

or Count of Gismond, Count of Tyrol in Innsbruck (Crowell 165; Allingham 16C;

Heffernan 141). However, the attitude of the Duke is more essential than his identity;

the Duke is a man of ―…manipulation and supreme power...‖ (Tucker 178). There

have been extensive studies and commentaries on how the monologue-bearer Duke

68 A dramatic monologue is

…organised around a single perspective and must therefore move in a single direction... [T]here

can be no right conclusion where there is only the speaker‘s perspective, and no necessary

beginning or end or limits... There can be only self-revelation. The style of address is much more

complicated in the dramatic monologue than in soliloquy ... [which] follows the style of address

of ordinary conversation ... [like] in the traditional lyric (Langbaum 149-150).

69 See Appendix XI for the full-text of the poem. 70 His other well-known paintings such as ―Fra Lippo Lippi‖ and ―Andrea del Sarto‖ are exceptions to this

assumption. 71 Allingham believes that the painting that inspired Browning is possibly a portrait of Lucrezia de Medici by

Angolo Bronzino (16C). The same idea was put forward by Louis S. Friedland in 1936. See Illustration II.xv.

238

has silenced and pressurised the freedom of the Duchess (Crowell 165-167; Harrold

42-43). Therefore, rather than dealing with the feminist aspects of the relationship

between the Duke and the Duchess, it is necessary to focus on the relationship

between the Duke, the portrait (as the representation of visual arts) and the poet.

The poem opens with a reference to a painting and ends with a reference to another

work of plastic art, a bronze bust by ―Claus of Innsbruck.‖ The idea of male

dominance is sensible in both works of art because while Fra Pandolf‘s painting

displays a woman almost caged in a canvas, Inssbruck‘s bust presents Neptune

―taming a sea-horse‖ (55). Thus, both works reflect the Duke‘s disciplinarian

character (Harold 43)72

. By keeping the Duchess within a canvas and treating her like

a private object more than a wife, the Duke entraps her as a visual slave, who is ever

obedient73

. Dissatisfied with the limitations of the canvas, the Duke also veils the

painting of the Duchess in a way a museum staff veils watercolours or oil works,

which hides the already silenced Duchess from the looks of others and brings a

―narcissistic quality‖ to the poem (Baker et al. 613)74

. His tendency to possess is

72 Harrold supposes that Browning must have read Plato‘s Symposium before drawing the Duke in his mind. (43-

44). In Symposium, there is a striking dialogue between Socrates and Antisthenes about ‗taming women‘.

Antisthenes asks Socrates why the philosopher did not educate his wife Xanthippe upon which Socrates answers

with an illusion to taming of horses to have ‗best-tempered horses‘. Treating women as the objects that should be

tamed and educated, it is not surprising to see that Browning‘s choice for mythological reference is Neptune

(Harrold 44). 73

The same notion is also found in ―Andrea del Sarto,‖ where Lucrezia is suppressed by the poet persona in a

painting:

While she looks – no one‘s: very dear, no less

You smile? why , there‘s my picture ready made,

There‘s what we painters call our harmony.

(32-34).

Heffernan traces the same notion in Edgar Allen Poe‘s Oval Portrait, where the painter dominates the short story

on grounds of absolute silence and likeness, Medusa myth, and Ovidian stories like that of Philomela (Heffernan

143). 74 A similar curtain theme was also observed in Sir Lily‘s painting (and Lovelace‘s poem) where the surrendered

king was depicted in front of a drapery hanging over his shoulders.

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observed in the use of pronouns as well. Including first person pronoun ―I,‖

possessive adjective ―my,‖ object pronoun ―me,‖ and reflexive pronoun ―myself,‖

there are twenty occurrences of first person pronouns.

The poem is composed of twenty-eight rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter but

the diction of the poem outperforms its metric perfections. As indicated in the heavy

punctuation (dashes, exclamation marks, quotation marks, question marks, and

hyphens), the poem is like a dialogue:

…She thanked men - good! but thanked

Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will

Quite clear to such a one, and say, "Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss

Or there exceed the mark"- and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse

- E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

…

Will 't please you rise? We'll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master's known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretence

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed

At starting is my object. Nay, we'll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.

(31-43, 47-56).

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Even though the poem is labelled as a dramatic monologue; it is as if the Duke is

talking to someone. However, his conversation remains one-sided since he does not

let the visitor speak just as he silences the Duchess. In Lubbock‘s words, the Duke

rejects the inclusion of someone else and keeps the accompanying person ―veiled and

disguised,‖ just as he keeps the painting (48)75

. Ironically the only person readers can

hear other than the Duke is the imagined painter Fra Pandolf:

…perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps

Over my lady's wrist too much" or "Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat…

(15-19).

Even here the painter‘s voice is ambiguous; the Duke refers to Fra Pandolf only to

veil his words with ―perhaps.‖ Therefore, although Browning seems to save some

space for the painter, he softens the effect of this alien voice since the Duke is a man

who is used to ―g[ive] commands,‖ not to be surpassed by others76

. A similar

contextual deviation is also indicated by the Duke‘s attitude towards the Duchess‘s

smiles to other man. He does not approve her habit of greeting other men because he

envies the little smiles and gestures she makes to the outside world:

She thanked men - good! but thanked

Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody's gift...

(31-34).

75 As it is understood towards the end, the person listening to the Duke is an emissary from a notable family of

Ferrara to arrange a new marriage for the Duke. 76 The word ―last‖ in the title of the poem evokes a similar sense (Harrold 39).

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The Duke may be arrogant, narcissistic, and immoral but he is a good talker. The

parallelism based on the dynamism in the poem is created by the conversational

diction, punctuations, and excessive use of verbs of actions. Baker et al. believe that

―[along with his interest in] theatrical, confessional, structural, and verbally

espressive aspects... Browning‘s concerns with the ‗dramatic‘ and with ‗voices‘

make him an important precursor of ‗modernity‘‖ (611). No matter how the poem

avoids voices other than the Duke‘s, Browning‘s ekphrasis recalls Homer‘s style in

terms of phonology and syntax. The verbs like ―call,‖ ―ask,‖ ―say,‖ ―speak,‖ along

with vocabulary related to sound and hearing like ―speech‖ (three times), add to the

conversational energy of the poem. On the lexical level, these unheard sounds are

contrasted with the vocabulary on seeing and looking: ―look‖ (four times), ―glance‖

(twice), ―picture,‖ and ―paint.‖ On one hand, the Duke sustains the sounds; on the

other he invites the painting to be viewed:

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will't please you sit and look at her? I said

"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

That depth and passion of its earnest glance…

(1-8).

It is possible to talk about an obvious ―a rivalry between word and image in... ―‗My

Last Duchess‘‖ (Baker et al.612). Besides, through the verbal quality of the poem,

the Duke judges and makes assertions on the Duchess and himself (Arnauld 104).

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―My Last Duchess‖ is essential in terms of the development of ekphrasis because it

shows one of the most cruel examples of the paragonal relationship where the visual

is suppressed and silenced. The Duke‘s point of view may not reflect Browning‘s

own attitude towards arts though the poem, as an individual entity, dominates the

painting. Similar to Keats‘s dynamic diction, Browning‘s poetic energy creates a

paradox between the stillness of the portrait. In this way, Browning, who presents an

exclusive example of the rivalry between the visual and the verbal, has inspired

many poets to compose poetry on paintings and their silence like Ashbery and

Muldoon.

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4.8. The Legacy: the Tradition Continues

The second phase of ekphrasis bears similarities and differences at the same time but

focusing on the differences between the first and second phases of ekphrasis reveals

more about the ekphrastic conventions that had been in use from the Romantics until

the twentieth century. One of the first points that attract attention is the tendency to

ekphrasize in smaller contexts and space. As opposed to the examples of the first

phase of ekphrasis like Homer and Virgil, ekphrasis is observed in short lyrics such

as odes, elegies, and epigrams except for some of Wordsworth‘s long narrative

poems. In other words, the status of ekphrasis has shifted from being a part of an

epic or a larger narrative to being a unique poetic instance. Moving away from the

supernatural world of epics and mythology77

, the contextual concerns have also

become worldly and individualistic as in ―Peele Castle‖ and ―My Last Duchess.‖

As observed in ―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ and ―My Last Duchess,‖ the paragonal

relationship reaches its climax during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both

on stylistic level and on contextual level, there is an obvious competition between

poetry and visual arts. Poets sometimes manipulate the rivalry either by suppressing

the poetic dynamism by using vocabulary that indicates stillness as in ―On the

Medusa‖ or by over-energising it by using verbs of action, frequent punctuation, and

exclamatory remarks as in ―My Last Duchess.‖ The paragonal relationship is further

observed in the connection between the gazed-female and the gazer-male. Poems like

―My Last Duchess‖ and ―On the Medusa‖ reflect how the gazer poet or the poetic

persona (usually male) enjoys gazing at the impotently still objects which turn them

77 Blake and D.G. Rosetti‘s interest in the medieval tales, mythology, and Biblical allegories could be regarded as

contextual exceptions here.

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into potential possessions under the scrutiny of the dominating (male) eye.

Subsequently it could be concluded that there is a noticeable inclination to give the

palms to the (gazing) verbal even though it is also necessary to keep in mind that the

visual and verbal had been experiencing a closer relationship compared to the first

phase of ekphrasis.

As it has been explained earlier, probably the most important development that

influenced the ekphrastic progress is the opening of public museums. After their

establishment in the early nineteenth century, the museums soon became places for

contemplation and artistic activity for poets. Like Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth,

Browning, and Blake, many poets were regular visitors of museums and galleries.

This is the reason why ekphrasis became more actual than notional since poets knew

the details about the works of plastic arts and felt the need to commemorate the

artists as indicated in the titles of the poems (Heffernan 91-92). The same reason also

affected the conceptions on arts. Once museums began to preserve the works of art

(that had been kept in the attics or basements previously) under accurate lighting and

in glass-boxes, the value of these art works immediately rose to fame. Poems like

―Ode on a Grecian Urn‖ and ―On a Venetian Pastoral‖ reflect this conceptual shift

that influenced the reception of visual arts and brought about a new kind of artistic

consciousness. This is also when meditative ekphrasis began to enter the ekphrastic

scene. As poets regarded museums as sights of contemplation, their poems began to

merge the solely pictorial with the inspirational as found in Rosetti, Shelley, and

Wordsworth. In short, although there are only a few genuinely meditative poems, the

purely imitative has been replaced with a culmination of the both.

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The typical ekphrastic features like prosopopeia and enargeia are still dominant in

the second phase of ekphrasis. Poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, and Browning feel

the need to compose through a narrator or a poetic persona while they also remain

loyal to pictorial qualities aiming to create the mind-picture of the target object for

the readers. As the images were ―recollected in tranquility,‖ prosopopeia and

enargeia were achieved through mind-pictures and memories. In short, while poets

like Wordsworth composed relying on his mind-pictures, some other poets like

Shelley combined their memories with myths, tales, and history as in ―On the

Medusa.‖ As far as the images ―recollected in tranquility‖ are concerned, it is also

useful to recall that the second phase of ekphrasis has also developed the idea of

idiosyncrasy that had began in the early seventeenth century. The poet turned to his

inner self and to the outer nature (and what it evokes in him) instead of following the

traditional clichés of love, heroism, and faith of the previous centuries. Therefore,

poetry became the expression of the individual poet rather than the voice of epic and

narrative conventions. ―Peele Castle‖ and ―On the Medusa,‖ for example, illustrates

how the poet provides space for their own voices as readers hear them contemplate.

Eventually the second phase of ekphrasis has combined the older tradition with a

new breath of individuality, enargeia, and stylistic predisposition. Having

experienced a closer encounter in this period, the verbal and the visual faced one

another first in the museums then on the page.

However, flirting with the image, the word did not always come up with a

welcoming diction; conversely it still displayed a struggle to suppress the sounds,

colours, and motion the image offered. In short, as far as the paragonal encounter of

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the verbal and the visual is concerned, this period could be thought as a period of

getting acquainted before moving into a new stage in their relation.

CHAPTER IV

Modern Ekphrasis

La Notte, che tu vedi in si dolci atti

Dormire, fu da un angelo scolpita

In questo sasso: e perché dorme, ha vita:

Destala, se no’l credi, e parleratti1.

First of all, the ekphrastic poetry of our time completes the

transformation of ekphrasis from incidental adjunct to self-sufficient

whole, from epic ornament to free-standing literary work… [Secondly]

the twentieth-century ekphrasis springs from the museum, the shrine

where all poets worship in a secular age (Heffernan 137-8).

Heffernan‟s description of the two basic characteristics of twentieth-century

ekphrasis sounds very familiar. At one hand he focuses on the individual body of

ekphrastic poetry that had freed itself from being part of larger narratives in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, on the other, he deals with the development

of museums as the initial “shrine” of ekphrastic poetry. Indeed, because the galleries

had collected the majority of works of arts from private collections by the end of the

twentieth century, modern ekphrasis naturally owes much of its material and context

1 Emphasis added. Michalengelo‟s ekphrastic epigram for his own sculpture entitled Night in Vasari. The epigram

evokes the feeling of speaking works of art as in the third phase of ekphrasis. The translation below is

Hollander‟s:

Night, which you see asleep in such a lovely

Attitude was sculpted in this stone

By an angel, and because she sleeps, has life:

Wake her, if you don‟t believe it, and she‟ll speak.

(45-46).

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to institutionalised galleries. Moreover, beginning from the early twentieth century,

there has been a shift in ekphrastic exercises in terms of mode and paragonal

relationship. Modern ekphrasis, as reflected in the third phase of ekphrasis, contains

the philosophical complexity of twentieth century while it also culminates the

ekphrastic characteristic of the nineteenth-century poetic tendencies and diction. This

chapter aims at explaining the ekphrastic tradition in its last (and also present) phase

by referring to stylistic qualities like lexical parallelism, foregrounding, poetic

structure, and [de]paragone2 as it has been carried out previously. After an

introduction to the literary and philosophical developments of the twentieth century,

sections studying the characteristics of representative examples of ekphrasis, such as

W.H. Auden, Derek Mahon, William Carlos Williams, and John Ashbery, will

follow.

2 See the following section 5.1. for more on deparagonal relationship.

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5.1. The Ekphrastic Big Bang

The title of this section is “The Ekphrastic Big Bang” for two reasons. First, the

coinage “big bang” implies a new beginning by indicating commencement for a-

thousand-year old literary device. Unlike the second phase of ekphrasis that had

revolted against the Renaissance eloquence and Restoration pretentiousness, the

beginning of modern ekphrasis is not a rupture but a continuation that suggests a new

enlightenment. As it is going to be explained and exemplified in the following

sections, modern ekphrasis builds over the late Victorian aestheticism and

comprehends arts in its brand new philosophical background by shaping and re-

shaping the tradition. Secondly, “big bang” successfully refers to the “boom” and

pervasiveness of modern ekphrasis with its phonolexical quality (Heffernan 135). It

is true that the number of ekphrastic works in this period exceeds the total number of

ekphrastic poetry written in the first two phases and many of these poems force the

limits of twentieth-century literary creativity and paragonal paradox3. Besides this is

the only period in which several collections (or series of poems) have been

published4 dedicated only to ekphrastic poetry such as William Carlos Williams‟s

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), W.H. Auden‟s Shield of Achilles

(1955) and Robert Fagles‟s I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh

(1978)5.

3 Some of the noteworthy examples are W.H. Auden‟s “Museé des Beaux Arts,” Derek Mahon‟s “Hunt by

Night,” John Ashbery‟s “Self Portarit in a Convex Mirror,” Paul Muldoon‟s “Anthony Green: Second Marriage,”

Marianne Moore‟s “Charity Overcoming Envy,” Thom Gunn‟s “Positives,” James Merill‟s “The Charioteer of

Delphi,” Rainer Maria Rilke‟s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” W.B. Yeats‟s “Lapis Lazuli,” Adrienne Rich‟s

“Mourning Picture,” and Robert Lowell‟s “For the Union Dead.” 4 Considering Giambattista Marino‟s 1620 collection Galleria, Heffernan thinks that the English speaking world

was “very late to publish a collection on ekphrasis” (Heffernan 138). D.G. Rosetti‟s Sonnets for Pictures is an

exception to this. See note 64 in Chapter III. 5 Some of the other volumes (of poetry and/or essays) that have been entirely dedicated to ekphrasis are Wallace

Stevens‟s Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) and The Old Guitarist (on Picasso) (1939), Nancy Sullivan‟s Night

Fishing at Antibes (1939), Buchwald and Roston‟s The Poet Dreaming in the Artists’s House (1984), Gisbert

Kranz‟s Das Bildegedicht in Europa (1973); special issues of Word and Image published by the Tate Gallery in

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Whether it is “fantastic nonsense” (Kermode 6) or the age of “reproduction”

(Heffernan 139), modern literature has come along way since the Victorian age.

Having experienced two great wars, numerous social upheavals, and political crises

in the first half of the century, the twentieth-century art has been through a number of

intellectual shifts, critical approaches, philosophical assumptions, and artistic

deviations such as the rise of Structuralism, Psychoanalytical theorems, New Critical

criticism, Post-modern fluctuation, lingua-central analytical approaches, New

Historical investigations, and deconstructive shattering. As for the ekphrastic

tradition, although it bears similarities to the previous characteristics as it has been

stated in the opening paragraph of this chapter, the twentieth-century ekphrasis has

gone through several alterations and variations that are (more than) enough to

suggest a new chronological period in addition to the first and the second phases of

ekphrasis. In this new period, or the third phase of ekphrasis, ekphrastic tradition

could not keep itself away from the intellectual and artistic panorama of the century

resulting in a number of changes that brought a novel breath to the tradition.

Initiated by early Romantics and developed in the Victorian age, the close

relationship between painting and poetry continued in the modern period only to

enter a new direction. The nineteenth-century notion of art for art‟s sake had led

poets to consider painting in a different way: “from painter‟s eyes,” an idea that

became more prominent in the twentieth-century criticism as the need to study works

1986 (Abse and Adams, 2:1, 2:2, 2:3) including poems by Seamus Heaney and John Hollander, J.D. McClatchy‟s

the Book of Essays on Ekphrasis (1988), and Beverly Long and Timothy Cag‟s A Bibliography of American

Poems on Ekphrasis (1989).

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of art from various angles turned out to be a necessity (Graham 476-477)6. The

image, then, which had been “exploited” in every aspect in the Victorian age,

became more essential and indispensable as the new century headed on and

eventually the paragonal relationship between the word and the image entered a new

course that would end for the good of the visual (Wagner 29).

The most notable change of the twentieth century took place in a much larger scale.

In fact the reception of poetry developed and changed so quickly that collections and

anthologies feel the need to label and catalogue almost each decade under a different

name and classification because “… there is no longer „poetry‟ but „poetries,‟ not

only in terms of what people want to read but also in terms of what they want to

write” (Kennedy 213). At the turn of the century, Modernist and Imagist poetry had

given the signs of a great change by separating feeling from thinking through the

notion of dissociation of sensibility thus leading poets of the age to a more concrete,

precise, and compact diction and style occupied with new imagery “both familiar and

distinct” (Kermode 167; Méndez-Ramirez 16). In time, other factors intervened and

the twentieth-century poetry, as well as ekphrastic poetry, gradually became

authentic, formally liberal, multiple-voiced, structurally problematic, local and

ethnic, politically charged, culturally involved, intertextual, experimental,

contextually complex, fragmented, playfully chaotic, and highly philosophical.

Kennedy sums up twentieth-century poetry by stating that it is a syntactical

assortment of “elements taken from earlier styles and periods, classical and modern”

6 These Pre-Raphaelite and Parnassian ideas are observed in Cubist considerations (Cézanne and Picasso) and

post-war (World War II) cinema and painting both of which regarded the clear distinction between time and

space in works of art (Graham 476).

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(81, 254). He argues that poetry of the age (especially after the 1960s) stands on the

use of several techniques and concepts borrowed from plastic arts, philosophy and

linguistics like bricolage of “multiple quotations,” parody, pastiche, intertextuality,

ex-centricity (regionalism), dialogue with realism, and scepticism (social, political,

intellectual) (86)7. Similar comments have been made by Hutcheon, who claims that

modern art is “inescapably political” (4), and by Morrison and Motion, who argue

that all modern works of art and narratives require a kind of “transition,” that would

set them free (11). In short, the poet of the twentieth century steadily became more

inclined with the idea that signs are arbitrary and arts were not as divine as they were

once thought to be and so they tried to avoid the nineteenth-century hero-artist myth

Auden describes:

The nineteenth century created the myth of the Artist as Hero, the man

who sacrifices his health and happiness to his art and in compensation

claims exemption from all social responsibilities and norms of behaviour

(“Calm Even” 128).

The ekphrastic practices of the age were in line with these new “poetries.”Like

modern poetry, modern ekphrasis, too, is thematically and structurally complex and

demanding. In order to understand the contradictory state of the new phase of

ekphrasis, the theoretical ideas of Mitchell should be visited. Mitchell is a good

starting point for two reasons. First, feeding on the linguistic and iconographic

inheritance of Saussure, Chomsky, Panofsky, and Gombrich, he provides an accurate

7 For Kennedy these qualities make today‟s English poetry “master (English) narratives” (86). These master

narratives have been suffering the thread of commodification, to make art consumable by capitalist culture (ibid.

216). There is a very well-designed list of the characteristics of twentieth century poetry in Kennedy‟s influential

book. See Appendix XIII for Kennedy‟s lists of characteristics of traditional poetry, poetry after the 1980s, and

twentieth-century art.

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genealogy of paragonal relationship (Iconology 8-10). Secondly, he is one of the key

theoreticians to have understood the new ekphrastic relations and presumably the

only critic to provide the most complete and exact theory of ekphrasis with

(post)modern awareness. Hence it is necessary to recall some of the basic

terminology Mitchell has introduced to appreciate the third phase of ekphrasis8.

Mitchell‟s first move is to assume that there is “no essential difference between

poetry and painting” in terms of the objects they represent (Iconology 49). He

believes that both arts represent the same appearances, events, figures, people, or

buildings only using different media. In this respect, both arts act like sign systems;

at least they should be regarded so. The verbal art feeds on the arbitrary signs of

language just as the visual art, arbitrary in itself9, which relies on a similar sign

system that also works like a linguistic code system (“Showing” 170-171). However,

drawing from Lessing, he accepts the conventional idea that poetry, belonging to the

“realm of ideas and feelings,” is an art of time while painting is an art of space that

represents status and “arrested action” (Iconology 47-48). It is because of this

aesthetic “gap” that the paragonal relationship needs “to be overcome” (ibid. 47-48;

Gary Shapiro 15):

…[the] debate between poetry and painting is never just a contest

between two kinds of signs, but a struggle between body and soul, world

and mind, nature and culture (ibid. 49).

8 A preliminary theoretical introduction on Mitchell‟s work has been presented in Chapter I as well. 9 Mitchell states that painting addresses the sense of vision but the idea of vision is primarily invisible and no

different than an image in the mind (“Showing” 166).

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In this rivalry, both poetry and painting act under iconographic masks; while one

uses letters and words, the other uses lines and images. Until now, Mitchell has not

exceeded critics of ekphrasis of earlier times but the paragonal balance of his

theorems changes when he states that the image has made a thorough leap in the

twentieth century. Just as Foucault, who believes that image “is not a simple sign but

a fundamental principle” (Order of Things 56), Mitchell argues for the dominance of

the image in modern ages. He calls this notion “pictorial turn” (Iconology 173;

Picture 59,167). Pictorial turn refers to the process that has made image a

“commonplace… existing phenomenon” (Iconology 173). Analogous with

Foucault‟s panopticon and pipe examples, image has replaced word as the dominant

prevailing medium of language, expression and communication10

. Therefore, the

image, which has been suppressed, raped, silenced, and pacified throughout the

tradition, has gained a more fundamental position and powerful grounds due to

visual-based media like television, cinema, graphic arts, and computer-based

communication11

. With regards to this notion, the alpha-state in the sisterhood has

changed hands in a way testifying Langer‟s comment: “…there are no happy

marriages in art – only successful rape” (86). Mitchell goes on to explain that the

results of this pictorial shift that has been effectual in linguistics, culture, and

sociology. For him, having lost much of its resources that had been regarded as an

“enduring as well as ancient poetic mode” controlled by its arbitrary signs for

10 Panopticon image refers to a certain kind of prison structure that reflects the all-seeing power of the image

(also the political systems of the twentieth century). See Discipline and Punish for further details. Pipe example

has derived from a surrealist painting by René Magritte, which illustrates a pipe accompanied by the tag “ceci

n‟est une pipe” [this is not a pipe] (See Illustration III.i). The contradiction between the word (tag) and the image

(pipe) leads the observer to wonder about which of the statements is true and thus challenges the observer‟s

preconditioned knowledge. Gary Shapiro believes that the observer usually allies with the image believing that

the paradoxical indication of the tag makes it highly questionable (14-15). In this sense, the signifying systems

images use are more reliable compared to the utterly arbitrary sign offered by written language. 11 In fact, some of the key images, or hypericons, such as Plato‟s cave, Locke‟s dark room, and Wittgenstein‟s

hieroglyphs, have always been with us and subconsciously “we keep referring to them” (Mitchell Iconology 6).

255

thousand years (Heffernan 137), the word has developed a defence mechanism under

the dominance of the image. Referred to as iconophobia12

, this fear of the image has

caused the verbal to recess to its arbitrariness and keep away from the visual territory

dealing only with the graph and the phonological.

Mitchell‟s arguments have been very influential especially in the last two decades of

the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. It is true that the image that

has progressively come closer to the word in the first two phases of ekphrasis is not

the timid, suppressed medium of the past anymore. However, it would be misleading

to assume that the paragonal relationship has totally turned upside down only to end

in the victory of the visual. It is safer to call the “duel” a draw as far as the twentieth-

century context is considered because the image has never come to be as powerful as

the word once was and it would be unfair to finalize the ancient paragonal rivalry

with the total success of the visual. Instead it could be argued that the modern phase

of ekphrasis displays a visio-verbal or verba-visual co-operation on equal grounds.

So the paragonal relationship pictorial turn offers is not an antagonism; rather it is a

de-paragonalised collaborative phenomenon in which there are no actual winners as

it is going to be exemplified in Auden and Williams. In other words, the paragone

has become deparagone, which refers to equalisation. However it is crucial to

remember that the term ekphrasis, in its core, refers to a verbal representation of a

visual representation: an explanation that seemingly contradicts deparagone. The

development of the tradition has shown that the focus was primarily on the first

phrase of this assumption (verbal representation) but the twentieth-century

12 Aka. Ekphrastic fear. See also iconophilia in Mitchell. For further details on iconophilia and iconophobia, see

Mitchell Iconology 3ff.

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deparagone, encouraging the conversion of the fixed image, has taught that the

second part (visual representation) is also fundamental in ekphrastic exercises if not

greater or stronger13

.

The necessary co-operation the deparagonal relationship suggests is observed in the

continued museum tradition. Inherited from the nineteenth-century, the habit of

visiting museums for inspiration is maintained. So while Browning composed from

the outside, keeping the visual away in private galleries and encompassed canvases,

modern ekphrastic practitioners like Auden, Williams, and Ashbery try to get

involved in the structure, meaning, and emotional suggestions of the paintings as

much as possible in the museum. In fact, as the only central spaces that can offer

works of art in catalogued and well-preserved environments, museums have become

the heart of ekphrastic poetry:

The ekphrastic poetry of our time, then, represents individual works of

art within the context of the museum… Synecdochically, the museum

signifies all the institutions that select, circulate, reproduce, display, and

explain works of visual art (Heffernan 139).

The interplay in the museums has become so “intra-textual” that the poet in the

museum is like a performer performing without an actual audience (Petrucci

“Poetry” 8-10)14

. The relationship between poetry and painting has been carried

away on more collaborative grounds as well. Combining the two arts many poets

13 The changing roles in certain examples of poetry and prose (especially in the latter half of the twentieth

century) should be regarded as a result of the post-modernist approaches, which offer playfulness, pastiche, and

intertextuality, undermine the idea of representation, and suggest verisimilitude (Heffernan 4; Petrucci “Poetry”

2). 14 Petrucci calls such kind of museum poetry “performance poetry” (“Poetry” 10).

257

have co-worked with painters15

. Waldman, who has taken part in some of these

workshops, states that “…you surprise each other… A painter comes and paints or

draws something on a blank sheet and she composes a few lines and it is like a ritual”

(132-133).

Consequently modern ekphrasis is a combination of the modern and post-modern

poetries and involves a culmination of styles, tones, and subjects. As it grew more

deparagonal and stylistically divergent, modern ekphrasis has inescapably felt the

need to co-work with modern practices of the century such as “discursive mode,”

“apparent fragmentation,” frequent invasions of distracting voices, and

“incoherence” especially in the latter half of the century (Kennedy 14). With a more

prosaic diction, the third phase of ekphrasis feeds on the earlier characteristics of the

tradition such as the nineteenth-century tendency for museums while it also makes

use of the new poetic conventions of the century as it going to be exemplified in the

following paragraphs.

15 Calling this encounter a “new division,” Waldman states that painters like Joe Brainard, Elizabeth Murray, Red

Grooms, Susan Hall, and George Schneeman have been producing works of art with the collaboration of poets

(131).

258

5.2. Auden: “Museé des Deux Arts”

Blake‟s watercolour Ancient of Days16

was composed in 1794 by using relief etching,

an acid-based colouring technique invented by Blake himself (“Etching”). As to how

the original copy of Ancient of Days came down to ornament W.H. Auden‟s New

York apartment wall is not known but it is true that Auden had a great interest in

paintings and images (Auden “Calm Even” 127). Just like the Romantic poets of the

previous century, Auden was a museum lover though, having experienced the two

great wars, the chaotic European atmosphere had prevented him from visiting more

museums against his will (Carpenter 4). Eventually his interest in painting has won

him the title „the writer of‟ “the most widely known… [and] the most influential…

ekphrastic poem…:” “Museé des Beaux Arts” (Hollander 249).

It is well-known that “Museé des Beaux Arts17

” is an ekphrastic poem accompanying

Peter Brueghel the Elder‟s famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, as

indicated by the clear reference to Icarus and the painting (See Illustration III.iii): “In

Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the

disaster…” (14-15). Indeed the painting is a poet-hunter having inspired other

renowned poems like William Carlos Williams‟s “Landscape with the Fall of

Icarus18

” and George Santayana‟s “Icarus.” Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is also

a significant exception because it is the only mythological painting of Brueghel the

Elder, or Peasant Brueghel19

, who is acknowledged with his religious themes

16 See Illustration III.ii. 17 Referred to as “Museé” henceforth. See Appendix XII for the poem. 18

Poets like John Berryman, Norbert Krapf and Joseph Langland also have poems composed on the painting with

the same name. 19 Brueghel is nicknamed “Peasant Brueghel” or “Brueghel the Peasant” because of his habit of dressing up like a

peasant to involve in country activities such as weddings (reflected in his Peasant Wedding) and carnivals

(reflected in his Peasants’s Dance and Children Games) (Hecht 19-23).

259

depicted in Flemish backgrounds (Stechow 50; Mayor 425). It is known that Auden

met the painting in his visit to Brussels in 1938 (Carpenter 99). Considering the title

of the poem, it is very probable that the version he saw is the original copy of the

painting that had been discovered and bought by Royal Museum of Fine Arts in

Brussels in 191220

. The poem, as is the painting, is basically about the human

condition in life and the indifference of human beings to one another. As Icarus falls

from the sky, neither the ploughman nor the shepherd cares:

…the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(17-21).

Recent studies have put forward the assumption that both Auden and Brueghel had

been familiar with the ignorance, suffering, and socially distressed structure of their

ages. Interestingly enough the thread were the German in both cases. Brueghel had

suffered from invasions of Hapsburg Empire (Mayor 424-425; “Auden‟s „Museé des

Beaux Arts”)21

. Similarly Auden had felt the tense atmosphere of the German thread

before the World War II in Europe. Another point that might be helpful in analysing

the poem is that Brueghel, who painted a unique painting on proverbs called the

20 The original oil-on-canvas painting is at Museés-Royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels. It is darker and almost

twice as large as the second version. The other Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is an oil-on wood work at Van

Buuren Museum also in Brussels. It is probable that this version is a quick copy of the original by Brueghel the

Younger. In this version the artist had preferred to add Deadalus on the air (See Illustrations III.iv. and III.v.)

(Kinney 529). However, recently, researchers believe that both paintings are copies of a lost original by the

Brueghels (“The Works of Arts”). 21 Brueghel states that his homeland suffered “under the foot of foreign oppression” (qtd. in “Auden‟s „Museé des

Beaux Arts”). He usually saves space for the heavy taxes, military sieges, and invasions of the Hapsburg Empire.

The Census at Bethlehem reveals that the census-taker and tax collecting officers are Hapsburg Germans as

reflected in the cote of arms above the door of the house, which centres the painting (See the squared area in

Illustration III.ix).

260

Netherlandish Proverbs22

, was presumably familiar with the Flemish proverb: “En de

boer ploegde verder...” (“And the farmer continued to plough...”) referring to the

ignorance of men towards the poor and the weak under foreign thread and/or social

unrest (Hunt). A similar proverb is also found in German and it is also possible to

have inspired Brueghel: “No plough comes to a standstill because a man dies”

(Heffernan 220). An exact reference is made to this proverb in Blake‟s “Marriage of

Heaven and Hell” and Auden‟s acquaintance with the theme may have been resulted

from his interest in Blake, as indicated in the opening paragraph of this section (ibid.

220)23

.

However, before moving on to the ekphrastic qualities the poem features, there is a

fundamental point that should be clarified since it will be very influential throughout

the analysis of the poem and may change the common assumptions about “Museé.”

It is often thought that the first stanza of the poem focuses on a universal truth while

the second stanza, opening with a reference to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,

focuses on Brueghel‟s work. The reliability of this widely accepted idea is highly

questionable. In fact, as it going to be explained, “Museé” is not simply a meditative

ekphrastic poem that solely deals with universal generalisations24

by taking

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus as its starting point and only source of inspiration.

To begin with, the capitalized “The Old Masters” in the second line refers not to the

22 See Illustration III.vi. The painting illustrates about a hundred of Netherlandish proverbs of Brueghel‟s time. 23 Blake‟s poem reads:

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

(“Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Proverbs of Hell” 1-4). 24 The poem‟s thematic background has been discussed and altered to such an extent that some of the critics even

question the notion that the poem is about a “universal truth” (Heffernan 147).

261

past generations, experience of the elderly, or the ancients but to the painters from

sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Actually, the term may have been used by Auden to

refer to specific painters like Michalengelo and Van Gogh as in some of his critical

writings (Auden “Calm Even”128, 137). More essential than that the first fifteen

lines in the poem refer to a specific painting again by Brueghel, and not simply to

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus25

. I argue that the painting behind the pictorial

background of the first stanza of the poem is Brueghel the Elder‟s the Census at

Bethlehem (1566)26

. The painting, which was being displayed in the same hall with

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (in late 1938) before the German invasion,

provides all the images in the first stanza, especially after the third line:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just

walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's

horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

(1-13)27

.

25 Some critics believe that the first stanza contains references to two (or more) paintings by Brueghel: The

Census at Bethlehem [aka. The Numbering at Bethlehem] and The Slaughter of the Innocents (Riffaterre

“Textuality” 8; Long and Cage 287; Hollander 251). Although it is true that The Slaughter of the Innocents may

have played a role in the creation of the chaotic background of the poem, it is unlikely for Auden to have seen the

painting between 1938 and 1939, when the painting was at Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, not in Brussels.

Hecht, on the other hand, assumes that Auden might have seen both paintings in a book (100). This argument is

also questionable because of the rarity of well-printed art publication during the 1930s. Heffernan argues that “the

three paintings” theory is an overstatement (146). The most accurate commentary about the source of inspiration

of “Museé” belongs to Arthur F. Kinney, who suggests that the first section of the poem had been composed on

The Census at Bethlehem with references to Bible. Although Kinney‟s short but accurate investigation deals with

the painting and Biblical references, his study of the poem contains missing and/or irrelevant details (529-531). 26 See Illustration III.vii. 27 Emphasis added.

262

Comparing the details provided in the poem with those on the painting, not a single

point is left out28

and the poem forms an almost exact parallelism with the painting.

As the painting shows, there are people eating, “walking dully along,” and opening a

window. There are also children who are “skating on a pond at the edge of the wood”

while, here and there, dogs are wandering around. Towards the middle there is a

horse that has turned its back behind a tree, probably “scratch[ing] its innocent

behind on a tree.” As for the people waiting for the “miraculous birth,” another point

should be clarified. Brueghel the Elder‟s basic concerns are religious themes though

his down-to-earth style never makes religious dogmas surpass his works. Rejecting

the dictations of the church, his religious figures are usually away from the idealised

conceptions about Christ or Mary (Hecht 102). It should be noticed that although the

name of the painting is the Census at Bethlehem, the scenery is typically Flemish,

portraying Brueghel‟s homeland. There is a country census going on in which

peasants have gathered in front of the census-taker‟s house to pay taxes and enrol in

the census list (“Auden‟s „Museé des Beaux Arts‟”). However, as its name suggests,

the Census at Bethlehem is primarily a religious painting displaying Mary and Joseph

entering the town29

. Towards the middle-bottom of the painting, Mary is riding a

mule dragged by Joseph ahead through the busy habitants rushing helter-skelter,

children playing around, and census enrolment crowd rushing up and down.

Contrasted with the dynamism of the painting Mary and Joseph are passing through

the town with their heads down. Just as he depicts the biblical story of Joseph and

Mary entering Bethelem30

in a Flemish setting, it is typical of Brueghel to portray

28 See Illustration III.viii. 29 See Illustrations III.ix. and III.x. 30 It is beneficial to remember that Brueghel was loyal to the anectode in that Mary and Joseph entered to

Bethlehem in order “to be counted for taxation” as it is in the Bible (Kinney 529):

263

religious figures within earthly against the dictum of the church. Besides it is

interesting to note that just like Auden, it is probable that Brueghel was also a

Protestant convert (Stechow 50-51; Mayor 424)31

. Therefore his reformist view in his

depictions is comprehensible.

…this picture‟s [Landscape with the Fall of Icarus] composition is

deeply affected by the psychological weight placed on the lower right

corner, which means that examination of the poem‟s form cannot be

detached from the story of what is represented; that is something that

must be brought from outside. Not only must one know the title (and

hence the story) to understand the picture, also the work‟s meaning is

inextricably intertwined with the work‟s formal properties of the painting

(Davies 63).

With regards to the hypothesis that “Museé” focuses on more than one painting,

common criticism like Davies above cannot be verified. Therefore, it is safer to study

the poem by referring to both paintings since only a study of the two paintings can

provide parallelism and explanations for the missing and misjudged details. Keeping

this in mind, it is going to be explained that Auden‟s poem is not merely a meditative

ekphrasis commenting and contemplating on man‟s ignorance towards others and the

painful results of indifference but a poem that moves between imitative and

meditative modes in order to illustrate human condition by depicting two particular

works of Brueghel.

And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Ceaser Augustus, that all the

world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyre‟ni-us was governor of Syria).

And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city. And Joseph also went up for Galilee, out of

the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem (because he

was of the house and lineage of David) to be taxed with Mary his expoused wife, being great with

child (Luke II: 1-5).

31 Towards the end of his life Auden returned to Roman Catholicism (Carpenter 86, 112).

264

The title of the poem provides a good start for analysis. Unlike typically ekphrastic

poems like “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci

in the Florentine Gallery,”or “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele

Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont” which carry revealing details

(painter, title of the painting, location) about objet d’art in their titles, Auden has

chosen a more generic title while he could have entitled the poem with an open

reference as he did in “The Shield of Achilles.32

” Although he could have named the

poem as “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” as Williams did, he preferred the name

of the museum probably because he composed on two paintings that hung in the

same gallery showroom in Brussels. There is also another reason that might have

been influential on the title. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting that

focuses on the ploughman in the centre not on the two little feet splashing in the

water on the lower-right side of the work. Indeed, as Heffernan argues, it would be

very hard to recognise the mythological reference of the painting should the title

simply be something else like “Landscape” or “The Ploughman” (148)33

. Therefore,

Auden may have recognised this point and have decided to include an exact

reference to the painting, “In Brueghel‟s Icarus” (14), in order to avoid the ambiguity

Brueghel‟s painting had offered. As for the Census at Bethlehem, it could be argued

that Auden presumably did not feel the need to indicate the title of the painting for

the reference to the painting was obvious enough and eventually preferred a more

common title like “Museé des Beaux Arts,” which would be more inclusive and

adequate to designate the painting(s).

32 “The Shield of Achilles,” first published in 1953, has also given its name to Auden‟s 1955 collection The

Shield of Achilles. 33 Heffernan states that, in such this case, only the copy at Van Buuren Museum would be revealing with its

flying Deadalus figure (148).

265

The poem has two stanzas and it manipulates metrical qualities of conventional

English lyrics with various lengths of lines and unequal metrical distribution. Hence

it is hard to talk about metrical parallelism; the only rhyming couplets are found in

the second stanza where “…turns away /…the ploughman may” (14-15), “…the

green / …that must have seen” (18-19), “…the forsaken cry / …out of the sky” (16,

20), and “…the sun shone / …calmly on” (15, 21) rhyme. Thematically, as it has

been mentioned earlier, the poem focuses on the apathy among people towards the

events that are taking place around (even right in front of) them whether the incident

is over a matter of little or great importance. This is also observed in the paintings.

Both of the events in the paintings are events of utmost importance that cannot be

turned a blind eye to: “a boy falling out of the sky” (20) and the coming of Mary and

Joseph that would eventually lead to “the miraculous birth” (7). So the magnitude of

these events and the degree of attention paid by the figures contrasts and this is

present in the poem as well. In order to form a parallelism between the paintings and

the poem, Auden created the same effect by his use of vocabulary in a similar

paradoxical way. The sense of pain and anguish created by the lexical items like

“disaster,” “dreadful,” “suffering,” “torturer,” and “forsaken cry” contrasts with the

sense of unresponsiveness created through adverbs like “calmly,” “dully,” and

“reverently.” Such kind of lexical deviation is likewise present in the tone, which is

conversational and carefree as if the narrator is telling a casual story about the

ordinary lives of men indicated by colloquial usages like “Anyhow” and “How.”

Consequently, in the paintings as in the poem, none of the figures are interested with

the “miraculous” events going on. In the first stanza and in the Census at Bethlehem

neither the children nor the animals are aware of the arrival of Mary and Joseph:

266

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just

walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's

horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

(4-12).

The same idea is also found in the latter half of the poem. As in the Flemish proverb

“And the farmer continued to plough...,” the ploughman shows no reactions.

Correspondingly the ship that Icarus falls near by “ha[s] somewhere to get to and

sail[s] calmly on.” Considering the Census at Bethlehem, it is clearly depicted that

none of the figures recognise Mary and Joseph, not even the four people right beside

the holy couple34

. The theme of indifference is more bereft in the Landscape with the

Fall of Icarus. The ploughman in the centre, the fisherman in the lower-right corner,

the shepherd and his dog in the middle are all indifferent to “the splash, the forsaken

cry” (16)35

. Even the sailors seem like they are deaf to the splash in the water just

near the ship which is against the code of seamen36

. It is interesting to note that none

of the figures are looking at the direction of Icarus‟s feet, even the fisherman looks

too busy to see Icarus right in front of him; the shepherd and his dog, too, have

turned their backs to the event, while the ploughman keeps ploughing with his head

34 See Illustration III.x. 35 See Illustration III.xi. 36 Leaving behind a (drowning) man in the sea is a violation of ethic rules of seamanship (Riffaterre “Textuality”

8). See Illustration III.xii.

267

down37

. So the fall is “not an important failure” and the sole consequence Auden

comes up is the “life-goes-on” theme:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life…

…the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(9-14, 17-21).

An analogous stylistic parallelism is created by the paintings in a peculiar way.

Brueghel had cleverly chosen his figures to centralise the paintings; the horizontal

and/or vertical focus of the paintings is never on the starring characters like Icarus or

Mary but on irrelevant and casual figures. In the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, it

is the shepherd. The indifferent shepherd, who (with his dog) looks at a totally

different direction other than Icarus, occupies the exact horizontal centre of the

painting38

. Brueghel‟s central figure is more metaphorical in the Census at

Bethlehem. Since life flows in its own course in the painting, Brueghel makes use of

a typically medieval symbol of life: the wheel of fortune39

(“Auden‟s „Museé des

Beaux Arts‟”). The wheel of fortune, with the twelve arms centralised around a

circle40

, was used to represent the zodiac which in return represented human life

(Huson 107-109). Just like the shepherd, the wheel is in the middle; but this time it is

37 See Illustration III.xiii. 38 The shepherd being a figure of 3 cm is in the centre with reference to the horizontal axis of the painting which

is 112 cm long: Xa: 54,5 cm, Xb: 54,5 cm; Y:8,8 cm: Ya: 24,7 cm, Yb: 32, 5 cm. See Illustration III.xiv. 39 Aka. “the wheel of life:” Gr.zoe (“animal, life”) + Gr. diskos (“wheel”): zodiac. 40 None of the other wheels in the painting has twelve arms; others either have thirteen, eleven, or ten.

268

in the almost exact centre of the painting41

. Therefore, though metaphorically, the

wheel in the middle represents the idea that life runs in its own course anyhow no

matter how people are ignorant to great changes.

Both paintings reflect their thematic considerations. Just as the figures, the painting

illustrates Icarus and the holy couple at unimportant spots of the paintings. They are

never centralised; rather they are lost in the worldly worries of surrounding images.

In the poem, too, they are neglected on verbal level:

From Brueghel‟s painting Auden picks out and emphasises the

„centrifugal‟ aspects – the flight from a common centre to a disparate

periphery where nothing coheres… Auden‟s poem, like the painting that

inspired it, has no focal centre around which the less significant events

are organised; its most important event occurs in its skirts, „by the way‟

as it were (Garrett 222-3)42

.

The stylistic parallelism on the theme of ignorance is well-thought in the poem.

Neither Mary nor Joseph is mentioned; the sole reference considering their identity is

made to Christ, “the miraculous birth,” and even in that, the name remains

unspecified (6). As for Icarus, whose name is mentioned only once, Auden does not

use any pronouns; there isn‟t a “he,” “him,” or “his” except for “a boy falling out of

the sky,” which indicates the insignificance of the figure and/or the event43

.

41 The wheel (5,9 cm x 4,3 cm) is in the centre with reference to the horizontal and vertical axes of the painting:

116 cm x 164,5 cm / (X: 5,9 cm) Xa: 79,2 cm, Xb: 79,2 cm; (Y:4,3 cm) Ya:55,6 cm, Yb: 56, 9 cm. See

Illustration III.xv. 42 Garrett refers only to the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 43 The only object pronoun in the poem, “him,” is used for the ploughman (17).

269

The grammatical energy of the poem is appealingly foregrounded. There are twenty-

one verbs of action like “take place,” “turn away,” “scratch,” “run,” and “fall,” most

of which indicate sheer action. Some of these verbs are gerunds (three in a single

line) providing further dynamism: “While someone else is eating or opening a

window or just walking dully along” (4)44

. It is interesting that some of the verbs of

action have been softened by the use of adverbs. The majority of these (nine) adverbs

are used to inactivate the motion the verbs evoke as in “walking dully along,”

“reverently, passionately waiting,” and “sailed calmly on.” These three adverbs of

time play an essential role in the poem‟s fame as a literary work about a universal

phenomenon; “never” (twice) and always creates the sense that the argument of the

poem is a result of experience as in:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters;

…

there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

(1, 6-10)45

.

Adjectives also add to the semantic parallelism. There are eleven adjectives

including colours like “green” and “white:” “…on the white legs disappearing into

the green…” (18). As opposed to the motion in the paintings, none of these

adjectives address to sense of hearing. Except for the two nouns “cry” and “splash,”

the poem, too, is indifferent to the audible qualities the two paintings might offer.

44 Emphasis added. 45 Emphasis added.

270

Except for the soundless atmosphere in the poem, which might have resulted from

the subject matter of the works (ignorance), the poem provides the paintings with a

dynamic diction and verbal energy with gerunds and verbs of action. As in the case

of verbs, the colours have been avoided at times as it was observed in Dante.

However, Auden does not hesitate to make use of such adjectives. Moreover,

“Museé” is not a typically suppressive ekphrastic poem putting lexico-verbal

pressure on the paintings. As the contextually central figures in both paintings are

already sadly ignored, Auden does not further trouble them with verbal dominance;

instead the diction is considerably relaxed and disclaiming.

To conclude, it could be stated that Auden‟s poem reflects the twentieth-century

poetic tendencies with his straight-forward and light-hearted tone. As seen on, the

verbal does not consider the visual as a rival but as a companion – it encompasses the

visual and keeps a certain stylistic parallelism with what the image has to offer on

grapho-logical, semantic, and syntactical grounds. Written in the 1930s, the poem

illustrates the new level of ekphrastic relations with its emphasis on the deparagonal

shift integrating poetry and painting. So the verbal is never the dominant sister

anymore as indicated in Auden‟s words “poetry makes nothing happen” (qtd. in

Kennedy 236).

271

5.3. William C. Williams: “Man Cannot Think Without Images46”

Needless to say, ekphrasis was also influential across the Atlantic. Especially after

the 1920s, ekphrasis was regarded as a primary literary device and this idea gradually

developed through the century to produce noteworthy ekphrastic poems like Walt

Whitman‟s “Death‟s Valley,” Donald Hall‟s “Scream,” Vicki Hearne‟s “Gauguin‟s

White Horse,” John Hollander‟s “Effet de Niege,” and W.D. Snodgrass‟s “Matisse:

The Red Studio.” Assuredly American literary tradition has come up with the only

international journals that specialize on ekphrasis and ekphrastic studies, Ekphrasis

and Beauty/Truth, just as William Carlos Williams, who is the only poet in this study

to publish a collection specifically dedicated to ekphrastic poetry in the twentieth

century: Pictures from Brueghel47

.

Williams is renown with his interest in painting. In fact he himself enjoyed painting

on Sundays at the parks of University of Pennsylvania (Szczepanek 4). In his life

time, he had composed about two dozens of ekphrastic poems and made friends with

the Cubist painters and theorists (ibid. 5-6). His first ekphrastic piece, “The

Dance,48

” was composed for Brueghel the Elder‟s The Kermess (Peasant Dance) in

1942. The poem was followed by his ekphrastic passages in Paterson: Book Five49

and in 1962 Williams published his Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, which

46 The statement is known to be Thomas Acquinas‟s (in his Summe Theologica, Ia-Q85-a1, Ia-Q84-a7) although it

has also been attributed to St. Augustine (See Hughes) (qtd in Chammings 2; Janet and Sb‟ailles 95). 47 Although Williams, who has a peculiar diction own his own, may not provide a general idea on ekphrastic

tendencies in the North America, the ekphrastic qualities of his poems reveal satisfactory clues about the

reception of ekphrasis, deparagonal relationship, and the new directions the tradition had gone through. This is

the reason why I have chosen Williams as the representative ekphrastic poet in the continent instead of Whitman,

or a more recent poet like Hollander. Besides Williams is the major figure that literary critics associate with key

words like “ekphrasis” and “America” (Szczepanek 4; Heffernan 155). 48 “The Dance” precedes Pictures from Brueghel collection. Actually the poem was first published in 1944 (in

The Wedge) and included in the collection (Selected Poems) much later, in 1985. 49 Written in 1958, published in 1960 in Hudson Review, the ekphrastic passage was composed on Brueghel‟s

Adoration of the Magi.

272

clearly shows that, among many other painters, Brueghel was his “special favourite”

(Verdonk “Painting” 233). The collection contains twelve ekphrastic poems, all on

different paintings on Brueghel like “Peasant Wedding” (on The Wedding Banquet),

“The Parable of the Blind” (on The Parable of the Blind), “Landscape with the Fall

of Icarus” (on The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus), “The Hunter in the Snow” (on

The Hunters in the Snow)50

, “The Adoration of the Kings” (on The Adoration of the

Kings), “The Corn Harvest” (on The Harvesters), and “The Dance” (on The

Kermess)51

.

Considering these poems, “The Dance” stands out with its notably playful diction

and structure. Typical of Williams, the poem offers a non-stop syntax, a relentless

fluidity, and scanning moves that resemble Jonson and Rosetti. It is a poem that

presents, what Krieger calls, “semiotic desire for the natural sign,” the ekphrastic

impulse to express the image, thus revealing Williams‟s imagist tendencies (11)52

.

“The Dance53

” is an ekphrastic poem on Brueghel‟s The Kermess54

that represents a

country carnival with its dances, music, merriment, love making, eating, and

drinking (See Illustration III.xvi.). Stylistically and structurally parallel to the jolly

and audio-visually dynamic atmosphere of the painting, “The Dance” displays a

50 John Berryman‟s “Winter Landscape,” written about thirty years eralier, also ekphrasizes on the same painting

just as Walter de la Mare‟s “Brueghel‟s Winter” and Joseph Langland‟s “Hunters in the Snow: Brueghel.” 51 The parallelism between the titles of the poems and the paintings reflect the museum-oriented ekphrasis of the

time. 52 By “semiotic desire,” Krieger refers to the western idea to fix and freeze the image (11-12). However he also

believes that, although poetry is able to achieve “verbal pictorialism,” the search for a natural sign or image is in

vain for it can never find and/or be natural (Krieger 12, 67). 53 See Appendix XIV for the text of the poem. 54 Aka. The Kermesse or Peasant Dance. Although the word “kermesse” is familiar in Turkish, it may not mean

much to a native English speaker. The word derives from “kerk” (i.e. “church”) and “mis” (“mass”) and it

primarily indicates a celebration in the Flemish country commemorating the birth of the protecting saint of the

village. The date of kermesses (or kercmisse and kermises in Dutch vernaculars) changed in every village for each

settlement was identified with a different religious figure. In time, these creed celebrations turned out to be

mundane funfairs and carnivals (Verdonk “Painting” 242).

273

unique rhythm, enargeia, and precise diction “recreating” the painting through verbal

repetitions and parallelisms (Sayre 135).

Williams‟s style is closer to imitative ekphrasis unlike Auden‟s poem55

. The poem

depicts the painting in every aspect. In terms of content, the poem is like a short

synopsis of the painting reminding us the short informative tags under the paintings

in museums:

…the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them…

(2-8).

From the central figures like dancers and pipers to pictorials details like “glasses,” he

scans the painting in almost every aspect. In fact, Williams straightforward style is

rather typical. Since he believes that the twentieth-century language suffers from

“…blurred, not decorative, non-linear syntax, unconventional” objects and dictions,

William prefers to concentrate on the unfussiness and simplicity of the target object

(paintings) by way of a purified and precise poetic language (Szczepanek 4). In many

of his ekphrastic poems, he focuses on the image and the figures that attract readers‟

attention at first sight:

55 Heffernan considers the poem as a solely descriptive piece (153).

274

According to Brueghel

when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

near

the edge of the sea

concerned

with itself

(“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” 1-12)56

.

The graphological laytout of these poems is also worth mentioning. It is typical of

Williams to present the image in the most precise way possible. There are hardly any

sentences but phrases that seem to be put in a random order vertically. This

uneconomical use of the page creates the sense that the poem is read from top to

bottom rather than from left to right as if the reader is scanning a poster or a

billboard. Having adopted the key concepts of the Imagist movement and carrying

the sounds of Romantic idea of the image, Williams‟s primary focus is on the central

images rather than on content or contemplation. The presentation of the central

figures is observed clearer as “The Corn Harvest” opens in an exclamatory remark on

the basic concern of the painting, summer:

Summer !

the painting is organized

about a young

reaper enjoying his

noonday rest

completely

(1-6)57

.

56 See Illustration III.iii. 57 See Illustration III.xvii.

275

Ekphrasis has never been more direct. It is Williams‟s characteristic to begin with the

first impression he gets from the painting58

. From this point, his poetry verifies

Heffernan‟s idea that modern ekphrasis is primarily museum ekphrasis. Similar to

“The Dance,” “The Corn Harvest,” too, recalls museum tags under each work of art.

One of the best examples of such museum-tag poems is “The Hunter in the Snow:”

The over-all picture is winter

icy mountains

in the background the return

from the hunt it is toward evening

from the left

sturdy hunters lead in

their pack the inn-sign

hanging from a

broken hinge is a stag a crucifix

between his antlers the cold

inn yard is

deserted but for a huge bonfire

that flares wind-driven tended by

women who cluster

about it to the right beyond

the hill is a pattern of skaters

Brueghel the painter

concerned with it all has chosen

58 In Williams‟s prose writings, too, one can sense the same direct diction. The straightforward quality in his

essay “Painting in the American Grain,” a descriptive essay on a gallery on early American painting in

Washington (1954), is worth quoting:

As you enter the gallery – there are a total of 109 paintings of all sizes – the first thing that hits

your eye is the immediacy of the scene, I should say the color!... A beloved infant had died. If

only they could bring it back to life again!... A head, a head of a young woman in its title

designated as “Blue Eyes,” caught my eye at once because of the simplicity and convincing

dignity of the profile... A portrait of a woman past middle life attracted me by the hollow-cheeked

majesty of its pose... The style of all these paintings is direct. Purposeful... (29-32).

276

a winter-struck bush for his

foreground to

complete the picture.

(1-18)59

.

By relating “the over-all picture,” Williams seems to have written this poem

particularly for art lovers who suffer from the loss of sight. Using such a pictorially

powerful and effortlessly straightforward style, Williams is possibly the most

representative poet testifying the museum-centred twentieth-century ekphrasis with a

peculiarly unswerving and prosaic style60

.

Williams also plays with stylistic structures of his poetry, which is at least as striking

as his unusually image-centred minimalistic diction. “The Dance” has “a circular

poetic structure to rival the structure of both dance and painting” (Sayre 138). It

corresponds with the cyclic dance and energy the painting suggests through internal

rhyme and carefully designed stylistic features. The cyclic move, foregrounded in the

syntax and lexis, is first found in the opening and closing of the poem:

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and

…

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

(1-2, 11-12).

As the initial line is syntactically and grammatically repeated at the end, the end

becomes the beginning again and this syntactical anaphora re-draws the reader into

59 See Illustration III.xviii. 60 Heffernan calls Williams an “amateur museum visitor… a story teller” because of his simplistic expressions

and his naïve observing eye dedicated to receive the pure image (155).

277

the poem once again and completes the geometrical move the painting suggests61

.

The same syntactical move is observed in the whole poem. Although the poem is not

designed to form a metrical coherence, it is a “waltz-like dance” with a rhythm and

music of its own (Verdonk “Painting” 238): “…the metrical line-boundary tells me

to pause, while the unfinished syntax pulls me into the next line” (ibid. 238). Indeed

run-on-lines leave readers breathless but they are also energetic just as the painting

itself. Typically Williams concentrates on the central images dancing on the right,

not on the details of the painting because he is more interested with the repetitive

musicality of the painting as the poem openly projects:

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies…

(2-5).

The musicality of the painting is also projected as repetitions and syntactically bound

line structure. All twelve lines are connected with enjambment so there is no pause

between the lines and the poem is read as if it is a single sentence (though there are

only two sentences in the poem). The same stylistic point continues on the lexical

level. The cyclic dance in the poem is reflected in the use of “(a)round” (five times)

and gerund structures like “tipping,” “kicking and rolling,” and “swinging.” The

syndeton based on the co-ordinating conjunction “and” (five times) makes the poem

ebullient:

61 Verdonk regards this repetition as an act to draw the frame of the painting on verbal grounds. He states that this

is a typically Gestalt point of view to consider figure-ground organization (in the 1910s) (“Painting” 240).

278

…they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies…

(2-5)62

.

A similar repeated pattern is the article “the” (eight times) that invites readers into

the poem and into the dance; and the dance of the poet and the painter becomes one

(Verdonk “Painting” 240). Readers are encouraged to dance with the dancers through

frequent references to third person plural pronouns: “their” (four times), “they”

(twice), and “them” (once). More than any lexical detail, music is the key quality in

both works. The music and sounds in the painting are reflected in the poem in such

as way that recalls Homeric ekphrasis and sound effects. Only three lines in the poem

(1, 2, and 12) do not contain a direct reference to sounds. The remaining nine lines

indicate that music is at the heart of the poem:

…the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling

about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance…

(3-11).

Musicality is structurally reflected, too. There is a constant alliteration on “b” and

“d:”

62 Emphasis added.

279

…they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies…

(2-5)63

.

Assonance on “i” and “i:” is clearer and its frequent repetition creates an effect of

bagpipe music in the painting:

the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling

about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts…

(3-10)64

.

Providing motion to the poem, the musical quality represents the sounds in the

painting. Readers hear the bagpipes playing while they also hear the tapping feet,

prancing dancers, and the background noises.

Apart from musicality, Williams‟s graphological choices also add dynamism to the

poem. In addition to irregular usage of punctuation, especially of full-stops and

commas, the lack of capitalisation provides the poem an energetic pace. When read

aloud, the words run swiftly and almost leave the reader breathless and tired. As

opposed to his other ekphrastic examples presented above, Williams‟s “The Dance”

looks more compact on the page in terms of syntax as well; in that sense “The

Dance” is not a vertical but a horizontal poem. This is probably because Williams

63 Emphasis added. 64 Emphasis added.

280

aims to create a circular effect (from left to right) rather than a vertical effect (from

top to bottom). Longer lines, supported with enjambment, lead “The Dance” to be

read in such a way that invites readers to take part in the spherical move with the

dancers in the painting share.

“The Dance” is parallel to Brueghel‟s painting in almost every level. As in many

modern ekphrastic pieces, it would be hard to talk about rivalry between the poem

and the painting. Indeed the poem opens and ends by calling the painting a “great

picture” and by commemorating the painter and title of the painting twice in twelve

lines. Therefore Williams represents Aquinas‟s notion “man cannot think without

images” by taking it one step further, to “man cannot express himself without living

images.” Parallel to the thematic and formal qualities of the painting, “The Dance” is

like the exact correspondence of Peasant Dance and a representative example of the

deparagonal relationship of the third phase of ekphrasis.

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5.4. Derek Mahon: “The Hunt by Sight”

Like Williams, Derek Mahon has a special interest in visual arts. Although he does

not have a volume dedicated solely on ekphrasis, many of his collections contain at

least on ekphrastic poem (Hugh vi-vii). His “Girls on the Bridge” (on Edward

Much‟s Girls on a Bridge) and “Courtyard in Delft” (on Pieter de Hooch‟s “The

Courtyard of a House in Delft”) are among his well-known ekphrastic poems.

However none of his poems on visual arts has received literary appreciation as much

as “The Hunt by Night” (Patke). Published in 1982, “The Hunt by Night65

” is the title

poem of Derek Mahon‟s tenth poetry collection The Hunt by Night. The poem is

composed after Mahon‟s visit to Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and his encounter

with Paolo Uccello‟s a Hunt in the Forest, or the Hunt by Night (See Illustration

III.xix.).

As a typical modern ekphrastic poem, “The Hunt” illustrates the painting on many

levels. But this time, the poet does not only depict and word-paint the target object

but also contemplates on it. Philosophising on the feeling Uccello‟s painting evokes,

“The Hunt” is more meditative than imitative. A Hunt in the Forest, which represents

a Renaissance hunting party, is known with its perspective techniques (Borsi and

Borsi 2-3). As explained in Vasari and Alberti, Uccello feeds on the Renaissance

methods that lead to geometrically well-designed paintings (Haberer 2). Haberer‟s

structural analysis could be helpful while studying the paralellism between the design

of the painting and the poem66

. Haberer makes use of a similar perspective analysis

with a vertical structure indicated with letters and numbers: each corner is designated

65 Referred to as “The Hunt” henceforth. See Appendix XV for the full-text poem. 66 Haberer‟s analysis seems to be the only in-depth analysis of the poem since it has been found out that very little

ciritical commentary has been made on the poem throughout the research.

282

with letters A, B, and C while the axes are numbered 1, 2, and 3. Similar to Marin‟s

model67

, he scans the poem with reference to the meeting points of each axis as: A2 /

B3 / C4 / C4 / B3 /A2 (ibid. 3-5). According to him, the painting has an exact point

of convergence (or vanishing point) supported with symmetrical lines of

convergence (ibid. 5). The figures or the hunt in general, meet towards the middle

and head to the vanishing point in the painting68

. Every single figure, from hunters to

hounds, move to the vanishing point and into the forest. From this point of view, the

painting is “…a powerful picture” with its dramatic quality, and vitality based on the

strict mathematical rationality of its perspective (ibid. 3). A parallel structure is also

observed in colours69

. The bottom of the painting displays the light green surface of

the forest (level 1) while the second level (level 2) displays the hunters and the

hunting company in bright colours like red, white, and brown. The last level (level 3)

contrasts with the moonlit levels (1 and 2) and it is quite dark, almost pitch dark,

blocking the sight from seeing the deep forest70

. The lighting in the poem is very

unconventional because the moonlight falls on the figures in such a way that they are

almost depicted as if they had been under spotlights. Contradicting with the dark

forest, the first two levels of the painting are strangely lit and visible71

.

“The Hunt” relates the background story of the painting. It could be read as a

metaphor of the history of man focusing on the concept of hunting from “neolithic”

times to the present. Mahon begins the poem by stating that hunting was an ancient

human exercise:

67 See Figure III in Chapter I. 68 See Illustration III.xx. 69 See Illustration III.xxi. 70 Mahon saw the painting in its darker state, before the painting underwent a thorough cleaning in 1988 and

became much brighter (Haberer 2-3). As it going to be explained, this darkness is reflected in the poem as well. 71 Haberer states that the crescent moon in the painting symbolises Diana, the goddess of hunt and moon (2).

283

Swift flights of bison in a cave

Where man the maker killed to live;

But neolithic bush became

The midnight woods

Of nursery walls,

The ancient fears mutated

To play…

(3-9).

Gradually, the bison hunting man, who “killed to live,” turned out to be a hunter in

“the midnight woods” (4, 6). Then, in time, these hunting parties became to ornament

“nursery walls” in the form of paintings. The story of hunting, then, is like the story

of mankind on the earth. Mankind has evolved from “killing to live” to hunting “for

fun… /And not for food” (4, 35-36). Therefore, going between describing the

painting and contemplating on the state of man, the poem also an inspirational piece

that describes the painting in the mimetic mode at the same time.

Parallelism is at heart of the poem. There are various semiotic levels like verbal,

iconic, and syntactical levels as well as some significant repetitive and corresponding

forms that have been spatially and icono-graphically applied. First of all, it should be

stated that “The Hunt” shares the parallel formal structures of the painting. It consists

of six stanzas with six lines in each and the relation of these thirty-six lines recall the

even distribution of images and colours on the canvas. As each group of figures

(horses on the left and right, hounds in the middle, trees in the background and so

on)72

the lines have been organised in an orderly way. Each stanza begins and ends

with a diametrical line while the rest of the lines gradually enlarge and diminish

reminding us a sense of breathing. The metrical length of the lines seems like

72 See Illustration III.xxii.

284

vertically standing rectangular shapes on the page which resemble the linear

distributions of figures in the painting. In addition to that the poem on the page

resembles the overall panorama of the painting when it is turned sideways as in

Herbert‟s “Easter Wings.” At this point, Haberer divides the poem into three sections

indicated by numerous incomplete sentences. He states that after the first part, which

is made of a single sentence, comes the second part, with three syntactical patterns.

The last section is the longest. For Haberer these sections, “leaping left and right,”

coincide with the general view of the painting. Besides he argues that there is a

central point in the poem (“…a point / Masked by obscurities of paint” (28)) similar

to the vanishing sight-centre of the painting; “…the two centres, that of the poem and

that of the picture, do not coincide” (Haberer 10-12). Moving on from this point, he

argues that the poem and the painting fail to address to each other due to the fact that

“in the painting the failure tends to be disguised under the cover of the exhibited

representation, whereas in the poem that same failure is more openly displayed”

(ibid. 15-16). He concludes that Horace‟s ut pictura poesis is verified because, “…by

means of semiotic codes that are radically different,” the picture-like poem fails to

capture the object it seeks after while the picture-like poem “...stops at the limit

which marks the Real as impossible” (ibid. 16). Although Haberer‟s thorough

analysis reveals key features about the stylistic parallelism between the poem and the

painting, I find some of the points overstated. First of all, it should be remembered

that there are only two sentences in the poem no matter how fragmented they may

be. Besides the middle of the poem doe not seem to focus on the centre of the

painting though it creates a sense of centeredness by referring to the upper and lower

ends of the painting as in “The mild herbaceous air / Is lemon-blue” and then “the

285

glade aglow … / diuretic spots, pungent prey” (17-18, 19-21). Mahon has himself

stated that by “diuretic spots… I simply mean pissing spots” of animals here and

there on the ground (qtd. in Haberer 11).

The non-stop dynamism of the poem is reflected on every level. There are only two

full-stops (one in the middle and the other in the end) in the whole poem. It is hard to

talk about syntactically well-designed sentences; instead the poem is composed of

patterns that look (and sound) like bits and pieces of the impression of the painting

indicated by the excessive use of commas. Besides the poem begins with a

syntactical deviation by opening in the middle of a sentence which creates the feeling

that there is an unarticulated beginning of the sentence like “There are…:”

“Flickering shades / Stick figures, lithe game” (1-2). Due to enjambment, lines flow

one after another. The phonological parallelism is achieved with assonance,

consonance, and alliteration almost in every line as in the alliterating “s” and “p,”

“…shades / Stick figures…” (1-2), “Diuretic depots, pungent prey” (21); assonating

“i,” “o[:],” and the diphthong “ei” “Flickering shades / Stick figures, lithe game” (1-

2), “…horses to rocking-horses / Tamed and framed to courtly uses / Crazed no more

by foetid” (9-11); and consonances like “-ck-” and “-gl-” Flickering shades / Stick

figures, lithe game” (1-2), “The glade aglow” (19). These phonological qualities

match with the shape (as if someone is breathing) and the sound of the poem when it

is read aloud.

The poem reflects the thematic concerns of the painting. Thinking about the depicted

hunting party, Mahon comes to realise that hunting has always been a common

286

exercise of man from prehistoric times (“man the maker”) to modern times as “the

ancient fears mutated” and hunt became an activity “for fun.” The change and

opposition between the past and present is adumbrated in verbs like “mutate” and

“become.” The poem invites readers to feel what human beings have become and to

see “…in what dark cave begun” has become a recreation. The verbal signifiers in

the poem are more revealing than the indication of change. The key characteristic of

the poem is the syntactically foregrounded motion. Collaborating with the energy of

the painting, “The Hunt” projects the dynamism through overly used adjectival

phrases. The twenty-two phrases like “flickering shades,” “swift flight,” “pleasant

mysteries,” “long pursued,” “pungent prey,” and “great adventure” prevent the poem

from being syntactically conventional. Instead, these short patterns create the sense

that the poem is an actually a compilation of notes on the painting presented in a

disorderly way. However, these images, one by one, complete the overall image of

the painting while providing a fluid pace for the poem. The hunting, running,

bouncing, and galloping images (like horses, hounds, hunters) are also reflected in

the use of verbs of action; considering that there are only a total of thirty-six lines

and two sentences in the poem, seventeen verbs of action (such as “go,” “kill,”

“live,” and “put”) and seven gerunds (such as “leaping,” “rocking,” and “hunting”)

give life to the frozen images. The choice of adjectives is analogous with the verbs of

action in reflecting mobility: “lithe” and “swift.” Mahon follows the Homeric mode

of representing sounds in words. As this is a Renaissance hunting game carried away

in the company of many dogs, horses, and hunters, the poem echoes the noisy

hunting atmosphere with words like “howl,” “echoes,” “horn,” and “cries.” “Fixing

287

his eyes upon… [the] balance” of the painting, Mahon re-expresses the dynamism

Uccello had suggested about six hundred years ago (Patke).

Mingling the linguistic elements with iconic representation, the poem follows the

hunt in the poem by “sight” on metaphorical, contextual, and structural levels73

.

Mahon reflects the materiality of the picture in the symmetrical distribution of lines.

Although the poem and the painting belong to radically different semiotic codes,

Haberer comments on the parallelisms by stating that:

… the only points in which they can truly be dais to correspond are to be

found with the insertion of the linguistics in the iconic (the title of the

painting), or with the added iconic value of the printed linguistic texts

(e.g. the formal symmetry of the stanzas and of their sequence) (14).

As the poem represents the painting structurally, stylistically, and thematically, the

paragonal relationship of the previous phases has turned out to be deparagonal. In

other words, as a representative modern ekphrastic poem, “The Hunt” melts and

meets the image and the word in the same pot by carefully projecting the “hunt” on

verbal grounds.

73 Haberer believes that there are two hunts going on. One is the hunt in the painting that has changed in time

(and the obscure origins of Neolithic man) while the other is the lives of readers as human beings, which refers to

the condition of modern man (13). Adding to what Haberer has claimed, another hunt is carried away by the poet

himself, hunting on the painting by sight and reflecting and word-painting it.

288

5.5. John Ashbery and the Mirror Effect

Williams Carlos Williams believes that all paintings are self-portraits:

What the artist will paint is his creation… It is his own face in terms of

another face. The artist is always and forever painting only one thing: a

self-portrait (qtd. in Dijkstra 198-99)74

.

A very similar idea on self-portraiture is also found in Marin:

“Painting one‟s own image in the mirror is the only method that allows a

painter to see and to make himself at the same time, to look at his image

and to inscribe it on the rectangular or circular piece of canvas. At that

point, the painting is the mirror and the mirror is the painting. Here we

have a case of perfect reversibility, an ongoing movement back and forth

between the gaze and hand, following what is an almost immediate

trajectory [original italics] (To Destroy 130).

Parmigianino‟s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is a good example of such self

painting but, composed on this particular painting, the best example of such

“creation” in ekphrastic tradition is probably John Ashbery‟s famous poem “Self-

Portraiy in a Convex Mirror75

.” Heffernan describes the poem as “…the most

resounding ekphrastic poem ever written and certainly one of the longest” (170-1).

Indeed, no ekphrastic poem is as long as “Self-Portrait,” which is nearly six-hundred-

lines-long in six verse paragraphs. As in the cases of Williams and Mahon, the poem

has given its name to Ashbery‟s 1975 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It

is also important to note that the collection the poem appears in is the only Pulitzer

Prize for Poetry winner in modern period of ekphrasis76

.

74 Original emphasis. 75 See Appendix XVI for the full-text verison of the poem. 76 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was an immadiate hit. Other than Pulitzer, the book won National Book

Award and The National Book Critic Circle Award in the same year.

289

As it has been stated earlier, the poem is a long contemplation on Francesco

Parmigianino‟s77

High-Renaissance style Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a

painting made in the typical self-portraiture manner (See Illustration III.xxiii.).

Commenting on this convention, Marin states that

Certain painters… use mirrors to mobilize depicted reflections capable of

introducing secondary points of view into the scene. These reflections

play a crucial role, for they essentially allow the viewer‟s eye, which is

situated at the point of view, to see the back side of things… this specular

arrangement [convex mirrors] has a specific technical and theoretical

importance. Namely, the distortions it causes alter the central axiom of

linear perspective, the basic principle of the representational and

enunciative apparatus (To Destroy 127).

While the enlarged and distorted image of the right hand appears at the bottom, the

drawing left hand is left out. It should be noted that in the sixteenth-century, mirrors

were being used newly in portrait painting exercises and the first mirrors were all

convex mirrors (Wetering et. al. 211). The convex mirror distorts the image by

enlarging the central image and stretching the edges to sideways. Probably painted

“to have fun,” Parmigianino‟s self-portrait was loyal to the convex image in the

mirror as the painter painted himself in a photographic way at a barber‟s (Marin To

Destroy 131). In the poem, Ashbery relates the story by quoting from Vasari:

“Francesco one day set himself

To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose

In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .

He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made

By a turner, and having divided it in half and

77 Aka. Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, (11 January 1503 - 24 August 1540).

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Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself

With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,”

(9-15).

The self-portraiture was a common exercise in painting. Painters sometimes painted

themselves for fame and sometimes to advertise themselves to attract patrons; in

some cases painters had to paint themselves when they could not find models

(Freedberg 146)78

. In ekphrastic poetry, however, interest in self-portraits is a new

phenomenon (Heffernan 182). Ashbery‟s poem is one of the rare instances in which

the verbal-poet is attracted by the visual-painter. This close up is the climax of

deparagonal relationship in which the poet welcomes the painter with reverence and

admiration.

“The Self-Portrait,” then, is one of the most representative ekphrastic poems of

Ashbery where the two media interact in a new mode79

. The poem represents the

spirit of the last ekphrastic phase in a number of ways. In that sense, it is like a

mosaic of modern ekphrastic tradition drawing from all the sources of (ekphrastic)

poetry of the twentieth century. However because the poem is too long for stylistic

considerations, the following paragraphs will try to focus on the essential

deparagonal and ekphrastic qualities in order to illustrate how “Self-Portrait”

represents and summarises the modern ekphrastic tendencies and then on some of the

stylistic features that need attention with references to particular sections of

Ashbery‟s lengthy poem.

78 Dürer‟s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Van Dyck‟s Arnolfini Marriage (in which the painter is spotted

from a convex mirror on the wall; Van Dyck had peculiarly signed the painting in the middle, where a tiny

scripture on the wall reads “Johannes de eyck fuit hic,” “Van Dyck was here”), Memling‟s Diptych with Virgin

and Child and the Donor Martin van Nieuwenhove, and Quentin Massys‟s The Money Changer and His Wife

(Freedberg 146). 79 “The Painter” and “And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name” are among Ashbery‟s other renown ekphrastic poems.

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Entitled with the same name of the target painting, “Self-Portait” is a poem that

meditates between descriptive and inspirational ekphrastic instances80

. Ashbery

concentrates on the thematic subjects similar to Auden‟s poem in a contemplative

tone while he also word-paints Parmigianino‟s painting. From the beginning the

poem concentrates on the captivity of the soul and how the poet empathises with the

image in the canvas (Bloom 20)81

. Readers sense a kind of emptiness in the portrait,

which, as opposed to its minimalistic appearance, reveals more than it seems to

suggest. Ashbery regards this emptiness as a hole in the soul captive in a circular

canvas and the viewers are peepers gazing through a hole. However as it is going to

be explained, the gazer relation is quite different from the paragonal relationship

between the gazer and the gazed. Rather than disturbing and dominating it, Ashbery

tries to help the image move out of its shell and to understand the motives behind the

image and the painter. To this end, considering the simplicity of the painting that

only suggests a large head, a distorted image of a hand, and a vague background with

a curved window, the poem is paradoxically long.

Regarding the poem in terms of ekphrastic tradition, it is a rich assortment of modern

ekphrasis and poetic diction. Parallel to the distorted image in the convex mirror, the

language is also decentred and “discriminated” (Sweet 1-2). The postmodern

reflections are indicated in many ways. The vocabulary of the poem is highly rich yet

full of deviations:

80 On the meditative quality of the poem, Bloom suggests that the poem is a meditation more than a lyric poem

and he likens it to Keats‟s “Grecian Urn” and to Wallace Stevens‟s version of Keats‟s poem, “Ode, The Poems of

Our Climate” (20). 81 Bloom thinks that Ashbery uses kenosis while presenting the captivity of the soul. Kenosis is “an isolating

defence in which poetic power presents itself as being all but emptied out” and it helps Ashbery to “empty the

action” for the image only to find a hand and an ambiguous hollow (24-25).

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Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas

Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes

And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea.

This is its negative side. Its positive side is

Making you notice life and the stresses

That only seemed to go away, but now,

As this new mode questions, are seen to be

Hastening out of style.

(303-309)82

.

Drawing from a number of fields like geography and zoology, Ashbery displays the

complexity of postmodern diction. Different from the past conventions, this is a

“new mode… hastening out of style” (308-309). Edelman notes that this kind of

vocabulary is a “vocabulary of disguise” and is typical in postmodern poetry (95-96).

The poem is analogous to modern painting in that they both feed on the

discontinuous, deformed, and contradicting “lines” and in turn achieve coherence out

of the chaos of multiplicity (“Ashbery, Parmigianino”).

“Self-Portrait” is an appealing poem in that it reads and presents the painting from an

art critic‟s eyes. He talks about the painting as a painting at first, trying to explain

how it was painted and in what conditions the painter began to paint himself:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer

And swerving easily away, as though to protect

What it advertises.

(1-4).

82 Emphasis added.

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The poem opens as if it is going to analyse the painting from an art historical point of

view. At this point it is necessary to remember that Ashbery‟s interest in painting

was a little more professional than Auden‟s or Williams‟s. Ashbery was the art critic

in the New York Magazine from 1978 onwards and he wrote about art in many

magazines, journals, and newspapers. Then “Ashbery is surely the premier

combination of art critic and poet in our time. He has probably written more about art

– especially twentieth-century art – than any other American poet ever has”

(Heffernan 169). This is also observed in his quotations from art critics like Vasari

and Freedberg. Ashbery quotes and gives citation references of his sources as if he

was writing an essay:

Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself

To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose

In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .

…

To accost others, "rather angel than man" (Vasari).

Perhaps an angel looks like everything

We have forgotten, I mean forgotten

Things that don't seem familiar when

We meet them again, lost beyond telling,

Which were ours once. This would be the point

Of invading the privacy of this man who

"Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish

Here was not to examine the subtleties of art

In a detached, scientific spirit: he wished through them

To impart the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator"

(Freedberg). Later portraits such as the Uffizi

"Gentleman," the Borghese "Young Prelate" and

The Naples "Antea" issue from Mannerist

Tensions, but here, as Freedberg points out…

(9-11, 236-250).

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By letting other voices intervene, the poem reveals both its intertextual inclination

and its generous attempt to give voice to the painting in a way more than a single

poetic persona could do. So as the long poem embraces a single portrait, Ashbery

attempts to provide the painting with multiple sounds from various sources. This

attempt recalls Shelley‟s scripture on the pedestal in “Ozymandias,” where the

already silent image was supplied with speech. But “Ozymandias” contrasts with

“Self-Portrait” in that the so-called given voice for the king is ironically used to

indicate how speechless the statue has become unlike the lively atmosphere Ashbery

creates for Parmigianino.

A similar point is found in the beginning of the poem. In one of his critical writings,

Ashbery states that “I think we‟re constantly in the middle of a conversation where

we never finish our thought or our sentences and that‟s the way we communicate”

(qtd. in Spiegelman 629; qtd in Heffernan 222). The prosopopeial poem also begins

in the middle of a talk, resembling Browning‟s poem. But rather than the talky Duke

whose monologue blocks other voices, Ashbery leaves space for other figures to

come up and perform. However the poem is made more vigorous with instant shifts

and exchanges as seen in the references made to Vasari and Freedberg. Besides, in

the poem, as in many Ashbery poems, “the speaker‟s attention seems to slide from

one thing into another in such a seemingly unplanned way that it would be hard to

say what the poem is about, if anything. We hear a lot of familiar phrases…” (Baker

28). Such verbal leaps result in an excessive use of punctuations:

Yet the “poetic,” straw-colored space

Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,

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Its darkening opposite – is this

Some figment of “art,” not to be imagined

As real, let alone special? Hasn't it too its lair

In the present we are always escaping from

And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days

Pursues its uneventful, even serene course?

(421-428).

As the tones changes frequently while Ashbery contemplates on the painting, he feels

the need to use question marks, quotation marks, hyphens and dashes here and there.

These “linguistic manoeuvres” add much to the non-progressive contemplation of the

poet (Spiegelman 155)83

. The frequent punctuations also result in a complex syntax.

Some of the sentences last for tens of lines and makes the poem hard to follow as in

the following nine lines packed up in a single sentence:

…Since it is a metaphor

Made to include us, we are a part of it and

Can live in it as in fact we have done,

Only leaving our minds bare for questioning

We now see will not take place at random

But in an orderly way that means to menace

Nobody – the normal way things are done,

Like the concentric growing up of days

Around a life: correctly, if you think about it.

(331-339)84

.

The single sentence above, for instance, is composed in nine lines. There are ten

interconnected clauses between the opening dependent clause “Since it is a

metaphor” and the main clause “…if you think about it.” Following one another with

an enriched use of punctuation, then, Ashbery provides motion for the painting at

least on verbal level. Commenting on this quality of “Self-Portrait”, which he calls

83 Spiegelman believes that because Ashbery‟s main concern is to question objects ontologically, “… [his] poetry

moves but it seldom progresses” (155). 84 Emphasis added.

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“the most important and most characteristic poem” of Ashbery, Spiegelman states

that the poet combines two genres: the image-centred Romantic nature lyric85

and

ekphrastic meditation (168). Considering the poem‟s linguistically intricate structure

and Spiegelman‟s combining formula, one may add that the poem also reveals

characteristics of twentieth-century poetics.

As far as the verbal-visual encounter is concerned, the poem reflects the new

understanding of paintings. The poet does not attempt to patronise the image; instead

he welcomes and embraces it as another symbolic medium. Therefore as Ashbery

“merges time and space,” he also merges the poem and the painting and uses the

verbal medium to speak for the visual (Spiegelman 160). Soon after the poem opens,

Ashbery makes a more striking move concerning the deparagonal relationship:

That is the tune but there are no words.

The words are only speculation

(From the Latin speculum, mirror)

…

We have surprised him

At work, but no, he has surprised us

As he works.

(48-50, 265-267).

He openly declares that words, like images, are arbitrary symbols and “only

speculation.” The etymological reference to the root of the word “speculation” is also

noteworthy. By searching the derivation, he finds out that the “word” has something

85 Spiegelman considers Ashbery as a basically “descriptive poet and maybe a landscape poet:” “Asbery‟s poems

often seem like verbal equivalent of a kaleidoscope that contains different parts of speech instead of rapidly

whirling coloured particles” (137). He thinks that the description of the painting is “the glue” that helps to keep

the poem together (ibid. 137). In that sense he likens Ashbery to Stevens and Emerson, who like Ashbery, suggest

“things” through depiction (Speiegelman 140-141). See Spiegelman 141-144 for his arguments on Romantic

imagery and description.

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to do with “mirror(s),” or more precisely with “sight.” Following the physical close-

up initiated by Blake and the museum encounters of the verbal and the visual,

Ashbery‟s attempt to look down into the relation reveals him that they come from the

same source: image in the “mirror.” It is as if Ashbery is testifying the sisterhood of

the two arts by looking up in their genealogy. Towards the middle of the poem, this

idea is developed to appreciate the image-maker painter as well. He regards his gaze

as an intrusion, a “surprise” for the painter. However, immediately after that, he

comes to realise that it is the image that surprises the gazer. Praising Parmigianino‟s

skills, he openly gives the palms to the visual for the words “…seek and cannot find

the meaning of the music / We see only postures of the dream” (51-52). Thus “the

inverted image on the mirror” begins to intervene the world of the verbal (Marin To

Destroy 159).

“Self-Portrait” represents the modern phase of ekphrasis with its multiple voices,

irregular syntax, concentration on the museum object and interesting tone that

encourages the deparagonal relationship between word and image. Kaplan

summarises the importance of the poem with regards to the twentieth-century

ekphrastic practices with the following explanations:

As shown in more contemporary discussions of the mode, ekphrastic

poems may share how the artwork makes the speaker feel or what it

reminds the speaker of; imagine and/or compare the poetic composition

process to the painterly one; question the painting or painter; praise the

painter and/or his artwork; or consider the literal or figurative

relationship between the viewer and the painting. It is a mistake not to

view these now common gestures as part of the ekphrastic mode…

Ashbery's long poem, based on and sharing the same title as

Parmigianino's painting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, serves as a

helpful aide in re-defining the mode of ekphrasis… [it is] an important

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example of the contemporary ekphrastic mode because it exhibits so

many distinctive ekphrastic opportunities… “Self-Portrait” here in depth,

as it represents a shift away from a traditional interpretation of ekphrasis

and also exemplifies an almost boundless variety of ways to respond to

an artwork. Ashbery's poem is also unique as it foregrounds artistic

decision-making, inspiring the reader in turn to consider and explore

technique. 'Self-Portrait' describes and models a wide variety of

ekphrastic responses, both implicit and explicit.

Kaplan‟s in-dept appreciation is hard to be added-on but it is necessary to re-

emphasise that “Self-Portrait” represents the peak of ekphrastic relationship between

the verbal and the visual that has come a long way from being a rivalry and a

symbolic contest on linguistic grounds.

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5.6. The New Ekphrastic Voice

Twentieth century has been a time of significant shifts for ekphrasis. Beginning from

the art for art‟s sake notion that resulted in the reception of paintings as unique and

precious products in the early twentieth century, poets developed a new sense and

understanding in their consideration of the works of visual arts. The museum that had

begun to impress verbal exercises now became the place that gave way to verbal

appreciation. As in the exemplified cases of Auden, Williams, Mahon, and Ashbery,

poets regarded museums as inspiring spaces that could drive them to contemplation,

meditation, and eventually composition. More to the point, especially in the latter

half of the century, poets visited museums with the sole intention of seeking

inspiration and writing poetry. Reminding us Ashbery‟s habit of going to museums

to write poetry, Waldman talks about a certain John Ashbery Method in which

Ashbery invites writers to “create a title and walk and come back to write” (140-

141). The end-product is a responsive piece of work that collaborates with the image.

As the poet meets the visual, he “…responds in a parallel fashion; then the writing

becomes a kind of artwork, in and of itself. It is as though the painter and the poet

can speak through a contained field…” (ibid. 137). Finally, after the 1980s, museum

visits were carried away in a more organised way in which “individual small groups

come together for new styles” in the attractive atmosphere of museums (Petrucci

“Poetry Workshops” 50).

What Mitchell has described as the pictorail turn, then, occurred in larger scales

because of the twentieth-century idea that both images and words are merely

arbitrary iconographic symbols and both aim to produce enargeia. Meeting in the

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same end, the verbal and the visual began to be considered and used together in

creating mind pictures which resulted in the notion that the two media need to

collaborate. Hawkins believes that the new mode of ekphrasis and poet‟s encounter

with the image in the museum occur on friendlier atmosphere; as the poet meets the

visual object, he tries to “make it familiar… [and the] abstraction interferes with the

knowing that seeks to identify… [in a] dynamic moment of lyric” (17). So the

twentieth-century poet does not try to suppress the image but he tries to “identify”

his verbal product through the visual target.

Eco believes that image “…possesses an irresitable force. It produces an effect of

reality, even when it is false” (qtd. in Wagner 45). Moving on from Eco‟s comment

and recalling the more consumable quality and psychodynamics behind the power of

images, Wagner points out that, in every way, an image “…it will look more

attractive to the reader than a text (31). Therefore, mastering its space and spatiality,

the image has come to take part in time or temporality as poets frequently turned to

images to compose. However, this move is a co-operative and responsive leap rather

than an intrusion. The poem does not simply overpower by describing the painting;

instead it expresses what the painting evokes and/or represents while it also

“translates the pictorial into the readable” (Wagner 31). Eventually, the paragonal,

which divided the word and the image between the “eye” and the “ear” once (da

Vinci Treatise 12), is now the deparagonal that allows the two mutual media meet,

cooperate, and inspire one another.

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In terms of style, modern ekphrasis follows the twentieth-century outline of poetry.

Therefore if modern poetry is based on “extreme discontinuity” (Bloom 20), so is

modern ekphrasis. Ashbery‟s diction is a good example of syntactical manipulation

where the sentences are broken into clauses and the meaning is blurred with modern

poetic modes. Similarly Mahon‟s poem shows that the ekphrastic impression could

also be expressed in phrases which can only imply the image. The diction may vary

from an extremely complex language as Mahon‟s and Ashbery‟s to more simplistic

linguistic choices like Williams‟s, through which he focuses on the image and the

represented action in the painting. Because it is hard to talk about a rivalry between

the two arts, the lexical choice of poets also shows variations. While some modern

poets, like Mahon, prefer to describe the motion through adjectival structures, some

others display a more dynamic language based on verbs like Ashbery.

Excluding Williams and other imagist poets that follow Pound‟s imagist search for

the pure image, the majority of twentieth-century ekphrastic poetry is closer to

meditative ekphrasis. This is probably because poets seek for inspiration in the

museums to express themselves by using a different medium as the source of

inspiration. As in Auden, Ashbery, and Mahon, poets usually come up with semi-

philosophical meditations based on the periods they lived in like the modern human

condition and psychology, captivity, loneliness, and pain. But whatever their motives

and subject matters may have been, the poets of the last phase of ekphrasis are more

conscious of what they are experiencing and composing: the word welcoming the

image.

CONCLUSION

Aiming to find out about the general characteristics of the ekphrastic tradition in

English with reference to stylistic correlations between painting and poetry, this

study has covered the history and development of the term “ekphrasis” as a literary

device from the antiquity to the present. Focusing on the representative examples of

ekphrastic poetry from Ben Jonson to John Ashbery, the survey and analyses has

shown that ekphrasis has experienced dramatic shifts throughout its long history.

This chapter attempts to summarise the fundamental findings and conclusions drawn

from the study and stylistic analyses throughout the dissertation such as lexical

examination, semiotic and semantic deviation, parallelism, and foregrounding. It is

also going to re-introduce the unprecedented terminology, and conceptual

assumptions and hypotheses. In order to recapitulate and pinpoint the foremost ideas

and observations, first the theoretical contributions the study offers to are going to be

covered followed by the major features of each ekphrastic phase in a chronological

order.

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6.1. Something New for Something Old

The task undertaken in this study is itself a new academic challenge because only a

few studies have considered ekphrasis from a stylistic perspective such as Verdonk

and Bosveld though these works are of much smaller scales. In order to bear this

challenge, the study has begun speculating on the definition(s) made for the term

ekphrasis. After having presented a number of definitions all of which focus on

different aspects of this literary device, it is concluded that a more inclusive yet

specific definition is needed. Heffernan’s definition, “…the verbal representation of

visual representation,” is the closest candidate to meet these qualifications (Museum

3). However it has been argued that this definition also needs modification for it

leaves out the aesthetic qualities of the target work of art and the poem itself.

Eventually it has been put forward that ekphrasis should be defined as the artistic (or

aesthetic) verbal representation (re-creation, or re-expression) of visual works of

art.

A similar point has been put forward on the etymological level. The lexical history of

the word “ekphrasis” has brought about two Latinised words out of the Greek

ekphrazein: ekphrasis and ekphrastic. In other words, the Greek verb ekphrazein,

which means “to speak out, to describe, to tell,” has come down to English only in

noun (ekphrasis) and adjective (ekphrastic) forms. Since the word ekphrasis has

dropped its original quality as verb, it has eventually become dependent on English

verbs and phrases like “write,” “compose,” “produce ekphrastic poetry,” and “create

ekphrasis.” Offering the verb ekphrasize and making use of the neologism elsewhere

throughout, this study aims to revitalise the root ekphrazein. It has been argued that it

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is possible to use the verb ekphrasize as an intransitive verb as in “Williams

ekphrasized whenever he saw a painting” (meaning that Williams was easily carried

away by paintings and was eager to write ekphrastic poetry whenever he saw a

painting), while the transitive form of the verb (preferably with the combinatory

preposition “on”) would also be rather useful in order to differentiate the object of

the verb (a painting, a statue, a building and so on) and to clarify the meaning and

antecedents in a sentence with several pronouns as in “Williams ekphrasized on

Brueghel’s paintings.”

The primary focus of this study was on the paragonal relationship. Introduced by da

Vinci, the paragone refers to the rivalry between painting and poetry on symbolic

level. Especially until the nineteenth century, the paragone has been the key concept

designating the nature of the relationship between the sister arts. It has been believed

that painting was an art of space while poetry was an art of time. The temporal and

spatial qualities attributed to sister arts have been maintained on semiotic grounds as

well. As observed in Lessing in the eighteenth century and Krieger in the twentieth

century, it is thought that painting makes use of natural signs. By natural signs, they

refer to the images and/or figures in the outside nature. On the other hand, poetry

relies on arbitrary signs (language, writing and so on), which denote no exact relation

to the addressed object. According to the da Vincian paragon, this is the reason why

poetry requires decoding (that is reading and/or writing). This contradiction is

reflected through the terms ergon and parergon. While ergon refers to the images

within the canvas (which also suggests that the images are bound to remain in a

limited space as silenced figures), parergon, as the frame surrounding the canvas,

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suggests limitation and intrusion to the peaceful and protected atmosphere of the

image, or the ergon. Acting as a supplement first, parergon gradually dominates the

territory of ergon and traps it. As it could be deduced from Derrida’s theorem, then,

ergon is usually used for paintings while parergon refers to the dominating verbal

within the limits of the paragonal relationship ekphrasis presents. Trying to give

voice to the painting at first, parergon often claims the semiotic dominance with its

arbitrary signs. Finally, it surpasses the effect the image creates, intrudes the

enargeia, and replaces painting as the major centre of focus. The paragonal rivalry

between the two media is observed in the majority of ekphrastic poems until the

twentieth century. Keats’s “Grecian Urn” shows that no matter how long-lasting the

image on the urn is, it is bound to remain silent and motionless. Aware of the

impotent state of the image, Keats mocks the silence of the image through words; he

seems to give them voice by way of verbal manoeuvres but all the sounds he

provides for the image are “unheard.” Shelley, too, follows the same tactic. The

image he ekphrasizes on is already dead in two ways: first it is captivated within the

limits of the canvas and second the Medusa figure in the painting has already been

slain by Perseus. So the parergonal poem becomes a verbal celebration of the twice-

silenced painting and an in-vain attempt to give life to the painting even though the

poet seems to provide motion for the figure with adverbs and verbs of action.

Analogous cases are observed in Browning, where the art-lover Duke is the verbal-

incarnate trying to supress the image of the Duchess through punctuation, non-stop

syntax, and verbal dynamism, and in Wordsworth, who suggests another painting to

Sir George Beaumont and word-paints over the already painted image of the Peele

Castle.

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The ergon-parergon conflict continues until the twentieth century. As it has been

explained in detail, the twentieth-century has become an age when the contrast

between verbal and visual comes to an end. Defined by Mitchell as the pictorial turn,

this new period gives the palms to the visual. As Mitchell has argued, the present day

is an image-centred time and is predominantly dependent on the visual medium.

However, although there is a certain visual leap in the twentieth century, it is an

overstatement to attribute the shift totally to the visual arts as far as the development

of ekphrastic tradition is concerned. As it has been discussed earlier, the modern age

(the period between the twentieth century and the present) brings up a tie between

the two media; in other words, although the rise of the visual is undeniably clear, it

has never become as powerful as the verbal was in the past. Therefore, the new

coinage deparagonal has been adopted to indicate the modern relationship between

painting and poetry throughout. Deparagonal refers to the equalisation process in the

paragonal relationship; neither poetry nor painting is dominant in the deparagonal

space. The rivalry, therefore, is not an obstacle before the enargeia the verbal offers

because now the representation is not principally a verbal representation, but simply

an enargeial representation. Figuratively speaking, the two media are the fatigue

armies of a thousand-year-battle and none has powers to rise and react against the

other. Observed in Mahon’s poem, the verbal does not attempt to overpower the

painting; on the contrary it celebrates each layer of the painting with a broken syntax

representing the scattered images in the forest. So just like the images that are

scattered around in the painting, the poem, too, offers an irregular poetic structure

and diction. Similarly, Auden’s poem contemplates on two paintings and evokes

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parallel feelings the paintings offer rather than trying to surpass and pacify the image

through verbs of action, sounds or adverbs.

Related to the paragonal and deparagonal relationships, another neologism was

introduced. Because ekphrasis is a term that is used to indicate a vigorous

relationship between painting and poetry and because, paradoxically, a great deal of

theoretical ideas have been put forward to indicate silence and frozen images, there is

need to bring forward another term to deal with this contradictory state. Dead

ekphrasis, which refers to the silent state the work of art experiences. As it has been

explained earlier, dead ekphrasis cannot be applied to paintings and poems in

isolation because a painting or a poem is already inactive until it is received by its

audience through gazing and/or reading. Within the limits of ekphrastic concerns,

both the target objet d’art (painting) and the poem share the same demanding state.

Dead ekphrasis occurs when the poem attempts to silence the visual effect of the

painting as in the cases of Browning and Wordsworth, and it leads to the immediate

suppression of the visual on verbal grounds.

This is also the case in majority of painter poems, which refer to the lyrics that

instruct the painter to paint in a specific manner. Adopted under different names such

as advice-to-the painter poems in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these

poems are the utmost representations of paragonal power of the verbal. Best

exemplified by Marvell’s instruction poems, a series of poems philosophising on

how a painting should be constructed in terms of style and context, painter poems

provides clues about the reception of painting by poets.

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Although similar attempts to categorise ekphrastic poetry have been made, only few

of them are applicable and plausible as far as ekphrastic characteristics are

concerned. As it has been discussed in length, dividing ekphrasis into numerous

types is not always useful. However, parallel to Hollander’s actual-notional

classification, a dualistic categorisation provides more concrete results considering

the poetics of ekphrasis while it also saves the analysis from being over-stated and

over-detailed. This study has presented two distinctive types of ekphrasis: meditative

ekphrasis and mimetic ekphrasis. Meditative ekphrasis (or inspirational ekphrasis)

refers to ekphrastic poems which present the poet in contemplation. These poems

usually focus on the visual effect paintings evoke and lead to discussion of universal

ideas and philosophising as in Auden’s “Museé” and Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait.”

Mimetic ekphrasis (or imitative ekphrasis), on the other hand, concentrates on the

physical qualities paintings offer; they celebrate the images by word-painting them.

As in Williams’s ekphrastic poems on the paintings of Brueghel, the poet celebrates

the image and the sheer visual effect the image creates in him. However, there are

two essential points to keep in mind while considering this classification. First of all,

this categorisation is basically contextual. Both mimetic and meditative ekphrasis

focus on the content, rather than the stylistic and/or structural elements the poem

offers. Secondly, as it has been emphasised earlier, this categorization is never strict.

Excluding some genuinely mimetic and meditative poems like Williams’s “The

Dance” and Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait,” respectively, it is hard to draw a boundary

between the two; a poem may both be meditative and imitative at the same time like

Auden’s “Museé;” or it may be meditative in particular sections while the rest of the

poem may be imitative as in Wordsworth’s “Peele Castle” and Shelley’s “On the

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Medusa.” The central point that should be remembered is that these categories are

only functional to designate the contextual focus of the poem and how it shifts, if

ever, from the image to contemplation or vice-versa.

This study was a survey of the ekphrastic tradition from its beginnings. Since many

surveys suggest a chronological periods, the dissertation has also offered a sequential

order in order to follow the changes the ekphrastic tradition has gone through. The

chapters in this study have been arranged in accordance with the general

characteristics of each ekphrastic age that have been observed during the process of

analysis. These analyses have shown that it is possible to divide the history of

ekphrasis in English into three periods. These periods have been named phases in

order to avoid confusions with the literary periods or ages such as the Romantic age

or the Restoration period. The following sections will focus on the guidelines of each

of the three ekphrastic phases and summarise the characteristics of the poetic

tendencies with reference to the analysed poems.

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6.2. The First Ekphrastic Phase

Chapter II has presented the development of the first ekphrastic phase from the early

examples like Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante to the Romantic age along with the

presentation of the early examples of ekphrasis in England exemplified in the works

of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The survey has shown that one of the major

characteristics of this phase is the progymnasmatic use of ekphrasis as a functional

device in larger narratives. Unlike the modern examples which are composed for the

sake of ekphrastic experience of the poet, ekphrasis is a supplementary device in

epics like the Iliad and the Aeneid and in long narrative works like Metamorphoses

and “the Rape of Lucrece.” In these works, the ancient function of ekphrasis,

enargeia, is applied and the ekphrastic passages usually aimed to create a mind-

picture before the listener’s eyes. The enargeia is sometimes created within the

process of production. In the Iliad, for instance, readers witness Hephaestus crafting

the shield while Arachne is depicted weaving her tapestry. Consequently, depicting

particular objects in detail, mimetic ekphrasis is more dominant than meditative

ekphrasis in the works of the first phase of ekphrasis though there are also

inspirational passages as in the contemplative poetic persona in the Divine Comedy.

Because these examples relate mythological and allegorical stories of epic characters,

ekphrastic passages are usually notional. Composed on imaginative works of art, it is

hard to correlate the poem with the target work of art. Besides, the majority of these

works have been composed not on paintings but on works of craftsmanship like

armours, shields, tapestries, and cups since the art of painting was to develop in the

Renaissance. For instance, while Homer depicts the Shield of Achilles, Shakespeare

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describes the tapestry that hangs on Lucrece’s wall. Connected to its epic qualities,

many of ekphrastic passages, as the rest of the narrative it takes part in, focus on the

heroic deeds of epic or mythological figures like Achilles, Arachne, Lucrece, or

Aeneid. Parallel to this point, the ekphrastic descriptions are usually ornamented with

elaborate figures of speech and literary devices like epic similes and deux machina as

in the Iliad and Metamorphoses.

The prosopopeial feature of these works is also worth mentioning. As in Dante,

Virgil, and Chaucer, the majority of ekphrastic instances are barely singular; they

contain a poetic persona other than the poet himself which evokes the sense of a

narrator depicting an object for readers and turn readers to listeners. The

prosopopeial quality developed by epic poets is also reflected in the apology style in

the Renaissance as in Sydney’s “Defence of Poesie.”

In terms of the paragonal relationship, the first phase of ekphrasis usually takes sides

with the verbal. The rivalry between the sister arts is often observed as the

captivation of the visual sign on the semiotic grounds of the verbal. As in Homer,

Shakespeare, and Jonson, the word captures the image through various techniques.

While the poet seems to celebrate the target object, he usually surpasses the visual

effect of the painting as in the examples of Homer, Jonson and Lovelace. Homer’s

phonoloexically strong diction replaces the powerfully represented visual object in

the Iliad. Correspondingly Jonson’s “The Mind,” which is parallel to the pictorial

layout of the engraving, is an example that clearly shows how the poem turns out to

manipulate the visual through its pacifying noun-based lexis. Painter poems of this

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phase are also worth mentioning about considering the paragonal dominance of the

word over the image. The frequent imperatives, clear-cut instructions, and verbally

constructed forceful style of painter poems like Marvell’s “Last Instructions to a

Painter” and Herrick’s “To His Nephew: To be Prosperous in His Art of Painting:”

indicate the poetic tendency to control and dictate the powers of the painter.

A similar case is observed in the relationship between word-image and gazer-gazed

correlations. As the paragonal relationship suggests the target objet d’art is usually

associated with the silenced and pacified female while the verbal is attributed a

vulgar and ravishing male role. In terms of context, this metaphor was very common

in works of the first phase of ekphrasis. As in the examples of Lucrece and Arachne,

the female represents the suppressed image of the target object. However, the crucial

example that has led modern critics to consider verbal-visual relationship within a

male-female context is the story of Philomela, who was raped and tortured in the

most offensive way possible. Philomela’s saddening tale has brought about the theme

of rape to ekphrastic studies. Just as Minerva tears up Arachne’s tapestry in

Metamorphoses, poet’s manipulation of the visual sign to create a verbal construct

has been regarded as a figurative act of rape. Subsequently the gaze of poet (male) is

thought to be an intrusion to the world of the silently hanging painting (female).

Adopted by many modern theoreticians like Mitchell, Heffernan, and Hollander, this

view is applied to ekphrastic examples which would produce a double contextual and

symbolic effect like the stories of Arachne and Philomela in Metamorphoses in the

first phase of ekphrasis and the silenced female figures in Browning’s dramatic

monologues in the second phase of ekphrasis.

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Within longer narratives, ekphrastic passages of the first ekphrastic phase are usually

highly energetic. Homer’s depiction of the making of the shield is a good example

how a poet may manipulate the visual through lexical suppression (sounds,

adjecvtives, and adverbs) and dynamic “verby” diction. Similarly Virgil’s

conversational style also shows that the first phase of ekphrastic poetry is aware that

it invigorates the mute image by giving voice to it and thus by surpassing its visual

effect. Although Jonson’s and Lovelace’s poems follow the structural qualities of the

target objects, they also change (as Lovelace interpretes the painting accordinhg to

his own political tendency) and re-shape (as Jonson depicts the images with a nouny

style) the visual through lexical and syntactical alterations.

While setting the ground rules for ekphrastic exercises, the first ekphrastic phase

introduces the primary discussion that will be influential on the following phases.

Moreover some of the characteristics of this phase like prosopopeial style, paragonal

struggle, and enargeia are have been adopted in the subsequent phases. In short, the

first phase of ekphrasis, as the initial period of a thousand-year-old literary

convention, initiates ekphrastic exercises that have come down to the present in

many levels.

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6.2. The Second Ekphrastic Phase

The second ekphrastic phase begins with the Romantic period and reaches the end of

the nineteenth century. As Chapter III has presented, there are two important

developments considering the shift ekphrasis experienced after the first phase of

ekphrasis. The first one of these changes is the ice-breaking re-encounter of the word

and image personified in William Blake. Blake has been regarded as a symbol at this

point. Following the medieval illuminated books, Blake draws and writes at the same

time. Exemplified in his “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the image and the

word share the same physical space. The significant consequence of this encounter is

that it indicates a new kind of relationship between the visual and the verbal. The

image or the art of painting in particular, experienced a dramatic shift in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Especially towards the end of the nineteenth

century, due to the flourishing art for art’s sake notion, painting began to be

considered as a liberal art that required aesthetic creativity and artistic craftsmanship.

In return, ekphrastic poetry began to consider painting in a friendly manner. This is

projected in Wordsworth’s emphasis on the image “recollected in tranquility.”

Indeed, the Romantic poets, as well as the Victorian poets who followed them (and

even the Imagist movement in the early twentieth century), showed great interest in

the visual qualities of the outside nature. This interest in the pure image gave way to

a highly pictorial as well as a stylistically straightforward diction that would enable

the poet to word-paint the pure natural image. The emphasis on the image and the re-

union of the sister-arts symbolised in Blake’s interest in painting, produced

representative ekphrastic poems like Shelley’s “On the Medusa” and Keats’s

“Grecian Urn,” both of which concentrate on the image the works of art offer.

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Similarly Wordsworth’s “Peele Castle” also meditates on the physical qualities Sir

George Beaumont’s painting represents.

Apart from the rise of the image as a favourable medium, a historical development

played a crucial role in the development of ekphrasis. The opening of public

museums such as the National Gallery and the British Museum in the nineteenth

century originated a new kind of consciousness in arts. As it has explained at length

in Chapter III, while they collected the works of art from private collections and art

collectors, museums also changed the idea that art works were bound to decay and

re-shaped it to initiate the notion that art works were actually imperishable. This was

an essential shift because the visual works of art such as painting and sculpture,

which were associated with space, now became to be considered in terms of time.

Therefore, poetry, which was known to be the temporal art that could stand the test

of time, was not alone in its paragonal throne. Eventually the paradox between the

spatial and the temporal was reflected in many ekphrastic works. One of the most

representative examples of the new paragonal face is Keats’s “Grecian Urn.” As the

stylistic analysis has shown, the poet of the time is stuck between giving voice to

works of art and silencing them; while Keats praises the urn he also mourns for its

persistent silence and immobility as observed in the contradictory usage of verbs of

action and the foregrounded adverbs that evoke immobility.

The establishment of public museums influenced the development of ekphrasis in

some other ways. As the museums were open to public viewing, poets began to visit

the museums to see paintings and soon this became a common artistic activity. As a

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result they found the chance to examine works of art in detail and began to compose

poetry specifically dedicated to particular works of art. The titles of ekphrastic poems

of the age reflected this development as in Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da

Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” and Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a

Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont.” Besides,

unlike the ekphrastic passages that functioned as pictorial parts of larger narratives,

poets began to ekphrasize in smaller scales; the majority of ekphrastic poems in the

second phase of ekphrasis became short lyrics and elegies focusing on a single work

of visual art.

Thematically ekphrasis turned out to be less heroic and more mundane; poet of the

time preferred to contemplate on a single image (the head in “On the Medusa”)

rather than a larger and didactic narrative (the myth of Perseus for example). As the

natural image gained importance, enargeia of the first ekphrastic phase was

maintained. In addition to the image-centred ekphrastic quality, the aesthetic

concerns of poets (and of painters) were also significant during the course of

ekphrastic development. The newly flourished nineteenth-century idea that art should

be criticised within the limits of art produced an art-conscious community. Therefore

poets, who had been accused for suppressing the visual in the previous phase,

regarded plastic arts with more insight and respect. Shelley, for instance, admired the

accomplishment of Renaissance painters just as Browning did. In fact it is interesting

to note that the first (Blake) and the last (D.G.Rosetti) poets that have been studied in

Chapter III were both poets and painters.

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All in all, the second ekphrastic phase mingles the characteristics of the previous

phase with a new understanding. No matter how the paragonal relationship still

favours the verbal, as represented in the curtain over the portrait of Browning’s

Duchess and Wordsworth’s painterly attempt to word-paint an alternative picture, the

emphasis on the image and the establishment of museums changed the balance of the

paragone and brought painting and poetry closer. Stylistically, the poems that have

been studied in this period are less powerful in terms of verbal qualities like

Shelley’s “On the Medusa;” they are more “nouny” since majority of these poems

focus on the images rather than motion. However, there are still poems that present

the paragonal relationship with the excessive use of verbs of action like Keats’s

“Grecian Urn” but the paradoxical structure of the poem and its hesitation to favour

the visual puts it somewhere between paragonal and deparagonal. Besides, as the

titles of the ekphrastic pieces of this phase suggest, ekphrastic poet is more conscious

of what he is doing: ekphrasizing on a work of art, which offers a different

communicative medium and a semiotic sign system as powerful as poet’s word.

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6.3. The Third Ekphrastic Phase

Ekphrastic poetry of the third ekphrastic phase is predominantly under the influence

of twentieth century poetics. Beginning from the early twentieth century, which also

marks the beginning of the last phase of ekphrasis that we experience in the present,

poetry has experienced various shifts and alterations due to numerous socio-cultural,

historical, economic, and intellectual developments. The outcome was a variety of

“poetries” based on modern and post-modern poetic concepts like intertextuality, free

verse, parody, pastiche, multi-vocal diction, and reproduction. Ekphrastic poetry of

the last phase correspondingly reflects these features. Ekphrasis is carried away in a

cleverer and conscious way and this is not simply on lexical or semantic level but on

sub-structural and sub-contextual grounds with the use of metonymy, complex

metaphors, in-line references, and intertextuality. Mahon’s “The Hunt,” for instance,

reflects the de-centred voice of the twentieth-century poet with broken syntax; there

are hardly any grammatically well-structured sentences. Actually readers can only

follow where a sentence begins or ends through punctuation – the individual phrases

and clauses here and there do not contribute much to the structural coherence.

Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” illustrates the intertextual structure of modern ekphrastic

poetry by giving exact citations from critics and art historians like Vasari and

Freedberg in the poem. With its parenthetical references and quotations, “Self-

Portrait,” reflects the transtextual and collaborative nature of modern ekphrasis.

Correspondingly, it is possible to claim that almost all ekphrastic poetry of the time

is occasional: poets compose poetry after visiting museums. It is as if poets

deliberately visit museums to write ekphrastic poetry. The modern ekphrastic poet,

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then, is a professional gazer unlike the poets of the previous ekphrastic pieces who

incidentally come across and are inspired by works of art. So the museum-effect

continues in the twentieth century; indeed, as it has been explained in Chapter IV,

modern ekphrasis is predominantly museum-based since the majority of works of art

have been collected by the museums throughout the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries. In other words, poets need to visit museums to ekphrasize since museum is

the only space that could bring painting and poetry together. Hence, as it is indicated

in Mitchell’s pictorial turn assumption, the visual balances the verbal. As the modern

ekphrasis offers a tie between the sister arts, poetry and painting collaborates in a

sisterly manner rather than rivalling with each other. Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait” is one

of those representative poems that rely on the visuo-verbal cooperation while

Williams’s Brueghel poems illustrate how poets of the modern phase were heavily

dependent on the works of visual arts to ekphrasize.

Combining an old literary tradition with modern poetic modes, the third ekphrastic

phase is a period of equalisation between the visual and the verbal. Neither painting

nor poetry is dominant; instead they co-work to add to the ekphrastic tradition in

English by making use of a number of techniques and stylistic tactics. More complex

and less paragonal, then, the last phase of ekphrasis presents an amalgamation of two

works of art on verbal grounds.

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6.5. Conclusion

By applying fundamental stylistic concepts like trans-textual parallelism, lexical and

semantic repetition, phonological and syntactical deviation, and grammatical and

(visuo-) structural foregrounding, this study has covered the ekphrastic tradition in

English from the antiquity to the present. As it has been observed in the analyses, the

tradition has experienced three major periods, each of which contain essential

revealing characteristics of their own. Apart from presenting a detailed survey about

the key concepts and the most representative examples of the convention along with

the significant philosophical discussions concerning the development of ekphrasis as

a literary device, the study has also introduced assumptions and terminology

concerning the definition (such as the verb ekphrasize, dead ekphrasis and

deparagonal relationship), classification (meditative ekphrasis, imitative ekphrasis

and the ekphrastic phases), and literary value of ekphrasis. Subsequently, it has been

concluded that ekphrasis, which is a thousand-year-old literary tradition that has

experienced various intellectual and artistic shifts, is one of the key concepts of

world literature and more analyses should be applied on the tradition to explore

different levels of ekphrasis. Because ekphrasis is an established literary device with

its roots in the antiquity and because a complete stylistic analysis of the tradition as a

whole is almost impossible to accomplish in a single study, more stylistic analyses

could be applied to particular poems and paintings. Besides although this study has

tried to cover the historical and literary development of the tradition, there is still

need to discover the origins of ekphrasis. Similarly, no matter how an entire chapter

of this study focuses on the twentieth-century ekphrasis, a thorough study covering

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especially the late twentieth and early twenty-first century would reveal the new

directions ekphrasis has been experiencing in the last three decades.

However, apart from literary analyses, more critical and theoretical analyses should

be applied on this ever-expanding literary device because it is true that essential

critical appreciations like Lessing’s and Mitchell’s may not always be applicable to

the changing face of ekphrasis in time. Throughout the course of this dissertation, it

has been discovered that only a few in-depth theoretical works have been published

in the long history of ekphrasis and the majority of these works (such as Heffernan’s,

Hollander’s, Mitchell’s, Krieger’s and Becker’s) have been published in the latter

half of the twentieth century. These works have added much to the critical

commentaries on the nature of ekphrasis of the previous centuries (such as Lessing’s,

Ruskin’s, and da Vinci’s) but more studies exploring the intricate relationship

between the verbal and the visual should be carried out. There are two basic reasons

behind this need. First of all, ekphrasis is a prolific literary tradition with more

ekphrastic poems getting published everyday and with its complex relationship

between the gazers and the gazed, the poet and the painter, the eye and the object,

seeing and being seen, suppression and dominance, and finally two different

signifying systems. Secondly, and more importantly, ekphrastic studies require a

perspective culminating art history, philosophy (especially ontology and aesthetics),

psychology, and literature because ekphrasis, as a literary phenomenon which

mediates between (at least) two different arts (or artworks), already evokes

correlations between these fields of study with its mind-stirring complexity and

intellectual (and eventually aesthetic) activity.

APPENDICES

Appendix I

Some of the other popular definitions of ekphrasis are listed below. Krieger calls

ekphrasis ―a general principle of poetics asserted by every poem in the assertion of

its integrity‖ (Ekphrasis 284), which is parallel to Graham‘s statement that ekphrasis

is ―essentially a rhetorical device in which an object formed in one art becomes the

matter for another‖ (467). Smith compares prosaic and poetic ekphrasis and ends up

with the idea that ekphrasis only functions as a narrative device (26). His definition

of the term is, thus, ―narrative within a narrative… a work of art graphically

representing figures from mythology, history or everyday life to provide an implicit,

didactic, commentary upon narrative‖ (Smith 10-11). Blackhawk, following

Heffernan, regards ekphrasis as ―verbal description of a visual representation, often

of an imagined object such as the shield of Achilles in the Iliad‖ (1) while Wagner

treats the term as a poetical and rhetorical device (even as a literary genre) (11) and,

M.C Howatson, very similarly, states that it is a ―type of rhetorical exercise taking

the form of a description of a work of art‖ (203). Leo Spitzer, in his influential essay,

―The ‗Ode to a Grecian Urn‘ or Content VS Metagrammar,‖ defines ekphrasis

plainly as ―the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art‖ (207).

Before his 1991 essay, ―Shelley, Medusa and the Perils of Ekphrasis,‖ Scott had

formerly regarded ekphrasis as ―appropriation of the visual other to master and to

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transform it (―The Rhetoric‖ 302). This description almost matches with Eidt‘s

words: ―verbal discourses that directly verbalize one or more visual images, often

discussed in terms of a power struggle between author and painter‖ (9). Finally, Jean

Hagstrum, who is one of the initiators of the interest in the subject, states that

ekphrasis ―…refer[s] to that special quality of giving voice to the otherwise mute art

object‖ (18).

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Appendix II

Some of the other Greek and Latin sources that apply or refer to ekphrasis are

Aeschylus‘s Seven against Thebes, Catullus‘s Works (Chapter 64), Propertius

Writings (Book 2.31), Statius‘s Silvae and Thebaid, Petronius‘s Satyricon, Silius

Italicus‘s Bellum Punicum, Valerius Flaccus‘s Argonautica, Heliodorus‘s An

Ethiopian Story, Lucian‘s dialogues, Philostratus the Younger‘s Imagines,

Philostratus the Elder‘s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Quintus‘s (of Smyrna)

Posthomerica, Dionysius‘s (of Halicarnassus) Rhetoric, Nonnus‘s Dionysiaca, the

writings of Longinus, Statius, Pliny the Elder, Sannazoro, Scaliger, Castelvetro,

Vossius, Quintilian, Lucian, Martial, Apuleius, Claudian, Bellori, Michalengelo, da

Vinci, and Dio Chrysostomus‘s Olympian Oration (where he compares Homer to

sculptor Phidias) (Becker 2). See Moffitt (47 ff.), Becker (2 ff.), Krieger (Ecphrasis

7-9) and Heffernan (1-5) for a more detailed Greek and Latin bibliography.

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Appendix III

There is an immense body of ekphrastic instances or works in English literature and

it is quite hard (and maybe futile) to list all of them. Below are two lists compiled

throughout the research process of this study; one of the notable poets and writers

who have either made use of ekphrasis here and there in their works or referred to

ekphrasis critically and the other of essential individual works that are either directly

or partially ekphrastic. Some of the items listed are not originally English but have

been translated into English. The poems, epics, plays and fictional works that have

been referred to or that will be referred to and analysed are not included in the lists.

The lists are in alphabetical order in order to avoid wordiness and confusion that

might result from listing two chronologically distinct works by the same author.

Among the other major poets and writers who have used or mentioned ekphrasis in

their works are: A.E. Housman, Aimée Hall, Anthony Hecht, Carol Ann Duffy,

Eavan Boland, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Honore de Balzac, Jim Bogan, Jo

Shapcott, Jorie Graham, Joseph Brodsky, Joseph Spence, Marianne Moore, Miller

Williams, Paul Klee, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Hardy, and Vicki Hearne.

Some of the well-known examples of ekphrastic poetry and prose are: Adrienne

Rich‘s ―Aunt Jennifer‘s Tigers;‖ Alain Robbe-Grillet‘s Dans la Layrinthe (The

Labyrinth’s Dance); Alexander Pope‘s ―Epistle: To a Lady,‖ in which the poet urges

the painter to draw the lady beautifully; Allen Ginsberg‘s ―Cezanne‘s Ports,‖ Alicia

Ostriker‘s ―Caravaggio: the Painting of Force and Violence;‖ Ben Jonson‘s Timber,

―The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Book,‖on the frontispiece of Sir Walter Raleigh‘s

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History of the World, and ―The Picture of Her Body;‖ Charles Algernon Swinburne‘s

―Sonnet for a Picture;‖ Czeslaw Milosz‘s ―Realism;‖ David Ferry‘s six poems on

photos by Thomas Eakins; David Wright‘s ―Before You Read the Plaque about

Turner‘s ‗Slave Ship‘;‖ Derek Mahon‘s ―Girls on the Bridge;‖ Donald Finkel‘s ―The

Great Wave: Hokusai;‖ Edgar Allen Poe‘s ―Bells;‖ Edward Young‘s ―On

Michelangelo‘s Famous Piece of the Crucifixion;‖ Edwin Markham‘s ―The Man

with the Hoe;‖ Elizabeth Bishop‘s ―Poem;‖ Elizabeth Jenning‘s ―San Paolo Fuori le

Mura, Rome;‖ Ezra Pound‘s ―The Picture,‖ which is on a painting on Venus in the

National Gallery; Felicia Heman‘s ―On a Picture of Christ bearing the Cross;‖ Frank

O‘Hara‘s ―Why I am Not a Painter‖ and ―On Seeing Larry Rivers‘ ‗Washington

Crossing the Delaware‘ at the Museum of Modern Art;‖ Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s The

Idiot; Gwendolyn Brooks‘s ―The Chicago Picasso;‖ Hart Crane‘s ―Proem: to

Brooklyn Bridge;‖ Henry Hart Milman‘s ―The Apollo Belvedere;‖ Hermann

Melville‘s Moby Dick, ―The Portent,‖ his short poem on John Brown, ―The Great

Pyramid,‖ ―The Coming Storm,‖ ―The Parthenon,‖ ―Formerly a Slave: An Idealized

Poertrait, by E. Vedder, in the Spring Exhibition of the National Gallery, 1865;‖

Jacopo Sadoleto‘s ―The Poem of Jacobus Sadoletus on the Statue of Laocoön;‖ Jane

Flanders‘s ―Cloud Painter;‖ John Ashbery‘s ―The Painter;‖ John Byrom‘s ―Verses

Written under a Print, Representing the Salutation of the Blessed Virgin;‖ John

Dryden‘s ―Song for St. Cecilia Day;‖ John Dyer‘s ―Epistle to a Famous Painter;‖

John Stone‘s ―Three for the Mona Lisa,‖ ―American Gothic,‖ and ―Early Sunday

Morning;‖ Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s ―Don‘t Let that Horse‖ and ―The Wounded

Wilderness of Morris Graves‖ from his When I Look at Pictures, a collection of

ekphrastic poems par excellence on art works from Goya to Motherwell; Lionel

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Johnson‘s ―By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross;‖ Lisel Mueller‘s ―Monet

Refuses the Operation‖ and ―Paul Delvaux, The Village of Mermaids;‖ Marivaux‘s

Le Télémaque (Telemachus); Mary Leader‘s ―Girl at Sewing Machine;‖ May

Swenson‘s ―The Tall Figures of Giacometti;‖ Myrna Stone‘s The Arts of Loss, which

directly refers to the lives and paintings of Boticelli, van Gogh, and Degas; Nancy

Sullivan‘s ―Number 1 by Jackson Pollack;‖ Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The House of the

Seven Gables and The Marble Faun; Oscar Wilde‘s persona, Vivian, in ―The Decay

of Lying;‖ Patricia Hooper‘s ―Monet‘s Garden;‖ Paul Engle‘s ―Venus and the Lute

Player;‖ Phillis Wheatley‘s ―To S.M., aYoung African Painter, on Seeing his

Works;‖ Randall Jarrell‘s ―The Bronze David of Donatello;‖ Rainer Maria Rilke‘s

―San Marco‖ and ―Portrait of My Father as a Young Man;‖ Richard Howard‘s

―Nadar,‖ a poem on Adrien Tournachon‘s portrait of Nadar; Richard Lovelace‘s

long-neglected epigram from his Lucasta, ―Upon the Curtain of Lucasta‘s Picture, It

Was Thus Wrought;‖ Robert Duncan‘s ―Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,‖

which is about a Goya painting of Cupid and Psyche; Robert Hayden‘s ―Monet‘s

Water Lillies‖ and ―Night Blooming Cereus;‖ Robert Southey‘s ―On a Landscape of

Gaspar Poussin;‖ Stanley Kunits‘s ―The Crystal Cage,‖ a poem on the works of

Joseph Cornell; Stephen Dobyn‘s ―The Street;‖ Sylvia Plath‘s ―Colossus;‖ Thomas

Tickell‘s ―On a Lady‘s Picture;‖ U. A. Fanthorpe‘s ―Not My Best Side;‖ W.B.

Yeats‘s ―Lapis Lazuli,‖ which is on a Chinese carving, ―The Municipal Gallery

Revisited;‖ W.D. Snodgrass‘s ―Matisse: ‗The Red Studio‘;‖ Wallace Stevens‘s

―Sunday Morning,‖ and ―Angel Surrounded by Paysans;‖ Walt Whitman‘s ―movie-

shot‖ poems like ―A Farm Picture,‖ ―A Paumanok Picture,‖ and ―A Prairie Sunset‖

(Hollander The Gazer’s 27); Washington Allston‘s ―On Rodin‘s ‗L‘illusion, Soeur

328

d‘Icare‘;‖ William Carlos Williams‘s ―The Wedding Dance in the Open Air,‖ ―The

Parable of the Blind,‖ ―Peasant Wedding,‖ and ―The Great Figure;‖ William

Shakespeare‘s Timon of Athens; William Wordsworth‘s ―Tintern Abbey,‖

―Ecclesiastical Sonnets,‖ ―To Lucca Giorgano,‖ a sonnet on a painting of Cynthia

and Endymion, ―The Gleaner‖ (originally entitled ―The Country Girl‖), and ―Inside

of King‘s College Chapel, Cambridge;‖ Wislawa Szymborska‘s ―Two Monkeys by

Brueghel;‖ X. J. Kennedy‘s ―Nude Descending a Staircase.‖ For a more detailed

bibliography see Becker (3 ff.) and Wagner (8 ff.) (especially on the ekphrastic

sources in German).

329

Appendix IV

Regarding the multileveled language as a system of codes, Leech and Short discuss

that Stylistics requires its own terminology (119). Defamiliarization, dramatic effect

deviation, deixis, cohesion, tropes (usually attributed to Greimas‘s master tropes:

synecdoche, metaphor, irony and metonomy) (Chandler 137), speech acts (deriving

from Grice‘s four maxims of speech: quality, quantity, relation, manner) (Leech and

Short 295), register (which ―is the term commonly used for language of a non-

dialectical type‖ i.e. politic, familiar, legal, religious and so on) (ibid. 80),

focalization, and parataxis are among the terms Stylistics derives from Formalism

and Linguistics. Moreover terms like cohesion (referring to the stylistic coherence

and unity of the text) (Short 36), domain, deviation, tenor, style variation (dialectical,

archaic, local, social) (ibid. 84-85), graphology (the writing system referring to

punctuation, syntactical order), graphonology (phonetic substance and its relation to

the written signs), phonemic and graphemic (the meaningful sound patterns and

suffixes) (Carter and Simpson 25), mind style (referring to the moral, social, or

emotive point of view), and register have been used and developed by stylisticians.

In addition to the major stylistic terms like parallelism, repetitive patterns,

foregrounding, and deviation, the following terms are also used in Stylistics. The

majority of the terms given here are technical terms concerning figures of speech or

rhetorical devices (endocentric [contextual] or exocentric [structural]). The list below

is in alphabetical order:

330

Anadiplosis and anaphora (pre-repetitive patterns), antanaclasis (double meanings),

antimetabole (repetitive opposites), antistrophe and chiasmus (cross-repetitive

patterns), epanalepsis (repeating the same semantic patterns), cohesive patterns

(meaning and reference connections), deictic patterns (metaphors and language

plays), epistrophe (post-repetitive patterns), homoiteleuton(syllable repetition),

metonomy, mnemonic patterns (musicality), polyptoton (multi-syllable repetition),

polysyndeton (conjuction repetition), synechdoche, and symploce (conditional

repetition). For more on stylistic terms see Özünlü (30 ff., 150 ff.), Leech and Short

(94 ff.), and Haynes (242 ff.)

331

Appendix V

Below is the full-text version of Ben Jonson‘s ―The Mind of the Frontispiece to a

Book‖ as it appears on the page in his Complete Poetry, edited by Parfitt:

From death and dark oblivion (near the same)

The mistress of man‘s life, grave History,

Raising the world to good and evil fame,

Doth vindicate it to eternity.

Wise Providence would so : that nor the good

Might be defrauded, nor the great secured,

But both might know their ways were understood,

When vice alike in time with virtue dured :

Which makes that, lighted by the beamy hand

Of Truth, that searcheth the most hidden springs,

And guided by Experience, whose straight wand

Doth mete, whose line doth sound the depth of things ;

She cheerfully supporteth what she rears,

Assisted by no strengths but are her own,

Some note of which each varied pillar bears,

By which, as proper titles, she is known

Time's witness, herald of Antiquity,

The light of Truth, and life of Memory.

332

Appendix VI

Below is the full-text of Richard Lovelace‘s ―To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly:

on that Excellent Picture of His Majesty, and the Duke of York, Drawne by him at

Hampton-Court‖ as it appears on the page in his the Poems of Richard Lovelace,

edited by Child:

See! what a clouded Majesty, and eyes

Whose glory through their mist doth brighter rise!

See! what an humble bravery doth shine,

And griefe triumphant breaking through each line,

How it commands the face! so sweet a scorne

Never did Happy Misery adorne!

So sacred a contempt, that others show

To this, (oth' height of all the wheele) below,

That mightiest Monarchs by this shaded booke

May coppy out their proudest, richest looke.

Whilst the true Eaglet this quick luster spies,

And by his Sun's enlightens his owne eyes;

He cures his cares, his burthen feeles, then streight

Joyes that so lightly he can beare such weight;

Whilst either eithers passion doth borrow,

And both doe grieve the same victorious sorrow.

These, my best Lilly, with so bold a spirit

And soft a grace, as if thou didst inherit

For that time all their greatnesse, and didst draw

With those brave eyes your Royal Sitters saw.

Not as of old, when a rough hand did speake

A strong Aspect, and a faire face, a weake;

When only a black beard cried Villaine, and

By Hieroglyphicks we could understand;

When Chrystall typified in a white spot,

And the bright Ruby was but one red blot;

Thou dost the things Orientally the same

Not only paintst its colour, but its Flame:

Thou sorrow canst designe without a teare,

And with the Man his very Hope or Feare;

So that th' amazed world shall henceforth finde

None but my Lilly ever drew a Minde.

333

Appendix VII

Below is the full-text of William Wordsworth‘s ―Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a

Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont:‖

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!

Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:

I saw thee every day; and all the while

Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.

So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!

So like, so very like, was day to day!

Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;

It trembled, but it never passed away.

How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;

No mood, which season takes away, or brings:

I could have fancied that the mighty Deep

Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

Ah! then, if mine had been the Painter's hand,

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the Poet's dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine

Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven; –

Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine

The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,

Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;

No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,

Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,

Such Picture would I at that time have made:

And seen the soul of truth in every part,

A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

334

So once it would have been, –'tis so no more;

I have submitted to a new control:

A power is gone, which nothing can restore;

A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold

A smiling sea, and be what I have been:

The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old;

This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,

If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,

This work of thine I blame not, but commend;

This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O 'tis a passionate Work! – yet wise and well,

Well chosen is the spirit that is here;

That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,

This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,

I love to see the look with which it braves,

Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,

The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,

Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!

Such happiness, wherever it be known,

Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,

And frequent sights of what is to be borne!

Such sights, or worse, as are before me here –

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

335

Appendix VIII

Below is the full-text of John Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn:‖

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

Forever piping songs forever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,

Forever panting, and forever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

336

O Attic shape! Fair attidude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

337

Appendix IX

Below is the full-text of P.B. Shelley‘s ―On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the

Florentine Gallery.‖ The brackets indicate the unfinished editing of the poet. The last

stanza the authenticity of which is not certain has also been added to end of the

poem:

I

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,

Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;

Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie

Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,

Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,

The agonies of anguish and of death.

II

Yet it is less the horror than the grace

Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;

Whereon the lineaments of that dead face

Are graven, till the characters be grown

Into itself, and thought no more can trace;

'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown

Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,

Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

III

And from its head as from one body grow,

As [?] grass out of a watery rock,

Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow

And their long tangles in each other lock,

And with unending involutions shew

Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock

The torture and the death within, and saw

The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

IV

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft

Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;

Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft

Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise

338

Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,

And he comes hastening like a moth that hies

After a taper; and the midnight sky

Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

V

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;

For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare

Kindled by that inextricable error,

Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air

Become a [?] and ever-shifting mirror

Of all the beauty and the terror there-

A woman's countenance, with serpent locks,

Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

VI?

It is a woman‘s countenance divine

With everlasting beauty breathing there

Which from a stormy mountain‘s peak, supine

Gazes into the [mid?] night‘s trembling air.

It is a trunkless head, and on its feature

Death has met life, but there is life in death,

The blood is frozen – but unconquered Nature

Seems struggling to be the last – without a breath

The fragment of an uncreated creature.

339

Appendix X

Below is the full-text of D.G. Rosetti‘s ――For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgone in the

Louvre:‖

Water, for anguish of the solstice:—nay,

But dip the vessel slowly,—nay, but lean

And hark how at its verge the wave sighs in

Reluctant. Hush! beyond all depth away

The heat lies silent at the brink of day:

Now the hand trails upon the viol-string

That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,

Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither stray

Her eyes now, from whose mouth the slim pipes creep

And leave it pouting, while the shadow‘d grass

Is cool against her naked side? Let be:—

Say nothing now unto her lest she weep,

Nor name this ever. Be it as it was,—

Life touching lips with Immortality.

340

Appendix XI

Below is the full-text of Robert Browning‘s ―My Last Duchess (Ferrara):‖

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will't please you sit and look at her? I said

"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

That depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 't was not

Her husband's presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps

Over my lady's wrist too much" or "Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, 't was all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace -all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush,at least. She thanked men - good! but thanked

Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will

Quite clear to such a one, and say, "Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss

Or there exceed the mark"- and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse

- E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose

341

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master's known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretence

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed

At starting is my object. Nay, we'll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.

342

Appendix XII

Below is the full-text of W.H. Auden‘s ―Museé des Beaux Arts:‖

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just

walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's

horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

343

Appendix XIII

Kennedy lists the characteristics of traditional understanding of poetry as follows:

1) Poetry is subversive and oppositional,

2) Poetry is diachronic as well as synchronic,

3) Self and authentic utterance is essential,

4) ―Poetry involves a particular relationship with language

where the moral, the technical, the musical, the erotic, the sexual

and the philosophical may all interfuse,‖

5) Poetry is sensual,

6) Poetry is a sacred space,

7) There is ―resistance of meaning‖ in poetry.

(247-248).

As for the general features of the poetry after the 1980s, he states that,

1) Poetry started in 1980

2) Poetry should be relevant to people‘s lives

3) Poetry is an open space

4) Poetry is democratic, it was elitist before

5) Poetry concerns a wider culture

6) Poetry is political and on the left

7) Poetry is serious but not boring

8) Poetry requires innovation

(248-249).

Kennedy has observed the following qualities concerning the characteristics of

twentieth-century art and aestheticism:

1) Arts are international

2) Art is good and more art is better

3) Art equals synthesis

4) Truth has been replaces by sincerity

5) Variety and quantity is essential in arts

6) Plurality equals virtue

7) There is an audience for every art.

344

8) The lines between arts and entertainment and leisure are

becoming blurred

9) Art dictates the suppression of difficulty and difference

10) Art should be accessible

(248-9).

345

Appendix XIV

Below is the full-text of William Carlos Williams‘s ―The Dance:‖

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling

about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

346

Appendix XV

Below is the full-text of Derek Mahon‘s ―The Hunt by Night:‖

Flickering shades,

Stick figures, lithe game,

Swift flights of bison in a cave

Where man the maker killed to live;

But neolithic bush became

The midnight woods

Of nursery walls,

The ancient fears mutated

To play, horses to rocking-horses

Tamed and framed to courtly uses,

Crazed no more by foetid

Bestial howls

But rampant to

The pageantry they share

And echoes of the hunting horn

At once peremptory and forlorn.

The mild herbaceous air

Is lemon-blue,

The glade aglow

With pleasant mysteries,

Diuretic depots, pungent prey;

And midnight hints at break of day

Where, among sombre trees,

The slim dogs go

Wild with suspense

Leaping to left and right,

Their cries receding to a point

Masked by obscurities of paint--

As if our hunt by night,

So very tense,

So long pursued,

In what dark cave begun

And not yet done, were not the great

Adventure we suppose but some elaborate

Spectacle put on for fun

And not for food.

347

Appendix XVI

Below is the full-text of John Ashbery‘s ―Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror:‖

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer

And swerving easily away, as though to protect

What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams,

Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together

In a movement supporting the face, which swims

Toward and away like the hand

Except that it is in repose. It is what is

Sequestered. Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself

To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose

In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .

He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made

By a turner, and having divided it in half and

Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself

With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"

Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait

Is the reflection, of which the portrait

Is the reflection once removed.

The glass chose to reflect only what he saw

Which was enough for his purpose: his image

Glazed, embalmed, projected at a 180-degree angle.

The time of day or the density of the light

Adhering to the face keeps it

Lively and intact in a recurring wave

Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.

But how far can it swim out through the eyes

And still return safely to its nest? The surface

Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases

Significantly; that is, enough to make the point

That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept

In suspension, unable to advance much farther

Than your look as it intercepts the picture.

Pope Clement and his court were "stupefied"

By it, according to Vasari, and promised a commission

That never materialized. The soul has to stay where it is,

Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,

The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,

Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay

Posing in this place. It must move

As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.

But there is in that gaze a combination

Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful

348

In its restraint that one cannot look for long.

The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,

Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,

Has no secret, is small, and it fits

Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

That is the tune but there are no words.

The words are only speculation

(From the Latin speculum, mirror)

They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.

We see only postures of the dream,

Riders of the motion that swings the face

Into view under evening skies, with no

False disarray as proof of authenticity.

But it is life englobed.

One would like to stick one's hand

Out of the globe, but its dimension,

What carries it, will not allow it.

No doubt it is this, not the reflex

To hide something, which makes the hand loom large

As it retreats slightly. There is no way

To build it flat like a section of wall:

It must join the segment of a circle,

Roving back to the body of which it seems

So unlikely a part, to fence in and shore up the face

On which the effort of this condition reads

Like a pinpoint of a smile, a spark

Or star one is not sure of having seen

As darkness resumes. A perverse light whose

Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its

Conceit to light up: unimportant but meant.

Francesco, your hand is big enough

To wreck the sphere, and too big,

One would think, to weave delicate meshes

That only argue its further detention.

(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,

Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom

In relation to the tiny, self-important ship

On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim

That everything is surface. The surface is what's there

And nothing can exist except what's there.

There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,

And the window doesn't matter much, or that

Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even

As a gauge of the weather, which in French is

Le temps, the word for time, and which

Follows a course wherein changes are merely

Features of the whole. The whole is stable within

Instability, a globe like ours, resting

349

On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball

Secure on its jet of water.

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,

No words to say what it really is, that it is not

Superficial but a visible core, then there is

No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.

You will stay on, restive, serene in

Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning

But which holds something of both in pure

Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.

The balloon pops, the attention

Turns dully away. Clouds

In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments.

I think of the friends

Who came to see me, of what yesterday

Was like. A peculiar slant

Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model

In the silence of the studio as he considers

Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait.

How many people came and stayed a certain time,

Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you

Like light behind windblown fog and sand,

Filtered and influenced by it, until no part

Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk

Have told you all and still the tale goes on

In the form of memories deposited in irregular

Clumps of crystals. Whose curved hand controls,

Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts

That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds

Like the last stubborn leaves ripped

From wet branches? I see in this only the chaos

Of your round mirror which organizes everything

Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,

Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

My guide in these matters is your self,

Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same

Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon

Much later, I can know only the straight way out,

The distance between us. Long ago

350

The strewn evidence meant something,

The small accidents and pleasures

Of the day as it moved gracelessly on,

A housewife doing chores. Impossible now

To restore those properties in the silver blur that is

The record of what you accomplished by sitting down

"With great art to copy all that you saw in the glass"

So as to perfect and rule out the extraneous

Forever. In the circle of your intentions certain spars

Remain that perpetuate the enchantment of self with self:

Eyebeams, muslin, coral. It doesn't matter

Because these are things as they are today

Before one's shadow ever grew

Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow.

Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted,

Desolate, reluctant as any landscape

To yield what are laws of perspective

After all only to the painter's deep

Mistrust, a weak instrument though

Necessary. Of course some things

Are possible, it knows, but it doesn't know

Which ones. Some day we will try

To do as many things as are possible

And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful

Of them, but this will not have anything

To do with what is promised today, our

Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear

On the horizon. Today enough of a cover burnishes

To keep the supposition of promises together

In one piece of surface, letting one ramble

Back home from them so that these

Even stronger possibilities can remain

Whole without being tested. Actually

The skin of the bubble-chamber's as tough as

Reptile eggs; everything gets "programmed" there

In due course: more keeps getting included

Without adding to the sum, and just as one

Gets accustomed to a noise that

Kept one awake but now no longer does,

So the room contains this flow like an hourglass

Without varying in climate or quality

(Except perhaps to brighten bleakly and almost

Invisibly, in a focus sharpening toward death--more

Of this later). What should be the vacuum of a dream

Becomes continually replete as the source of dreams

Is being tapped so that this one dream

May wax, flourish like a cabbage rose,

351

Defying sumptuary laws, leaving us

To awake and try to begin living in what

Has now become a slum. Sydney Freedberg in his

Parmigianino says of it: "Realism in this portrait

No longer produces and objective truth, but a bizarria . . .

However its distortion does not create

A feeling of disharmony . . . The forms retain

A strong measure of ideal beauty," because

Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day

We notice the hole they left. Now their importance

If not their meaning is plain. They were to nourish

A dream which includes them all, as they are

Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror.

They seemed strange because we couldn't actually see them.

And we realize this only at a point where they lapse

Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up

Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.

The forms retain a strong measure of ideal beauty

As they forage in secret on our idea of distortion.

Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since

Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed?

Something like living occurs, a movement

Out of the dream into its codification.

As I start to forget it

It presents its stereotype again

But it is an unfamiliar stereotype, the face

Riding at anchor, issued from hazards, soon

To accost others, "rather angel than man" (Vasari).

Perhaps an angel looks like everything

We have forgotten, I mean forgotten

Things that don't seem familiar when

We meet them again, lost beyond telling,

Which were ours once. This would be the point

Of invading the privacy of this man who

"Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish

Here was not to examine the subtleties of art

In a detached, scientific spirit: he wished through them

To impart the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator"

(Freedberg). Later portraits such as the Uffizi

"Gentleman," the Borghese "Young Prelate" and

The Naples "Antea" issue from Mannerist

Tensions, but here, as Freedberg points out,

The surprise, the tension are in the concept

Rather than its realization.

The consonance of the High Renaissance

Is present, though distorted by the mirror.

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering

352

The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface

(It is the first mirror portrait),

So that you could be fooled for a moment

Before you realize the reflection

Isn't yours. You feel then like one of those

Hoffmann characters who have been deprived

Of a reflection, except that the whole of me

Is seen to be supplanted by the strict

Otherness of the painter in his

Other room. We have surprised him

At work, but no, he has surprised us

As he works. The picture is almost finished,

The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,

Startled by a snowfall which even now is

Ending in specks and sparkles of snow.

It happened while you were inside, asleep,

And there is no reason why you should have

Been awake for it, except that the day

Is ending and it will be hard for you

To get to sleep tonight, at least until late.

The shadow of the city injects its own

Urgency: Rome where Francesco

Was at work during the Sack: his inventions

Amazed the soldiers who burst in on him;

They decided to spare his life, but he left soon after;

Vienna where the painting is today, where

I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York

Where I am now, which is a logarithm

Of other cities. Our landscape

Is alive with filiations, shuttlings;

Business is carried on by look, gesture,

Hearsay. It is another life to the city,

The backing of the looking glass of the

Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. It wants

To siphon off the life of the studio, deflate

Its mapped space to enactments, island it.

That operation has been temporarily stalled

But something new is on the way, a new preciosity

In the wind. Can you stand it,

Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?

This wind brings what it knows not, is

Self--propelled, blind, has no notion

Of itself. It is inertia that once

Acknowledged saps all activity, secret or public:

Whispers of the word that can't be understood

But can be felt, a chill, a blight

Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas

353

Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes

And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea.

This is its negative side. Its positive side is

Making you notice life and the stresses

That only seemed to go away, but now,

As this new mode questions, are seen to be

Hastening out of style. If they are to become classics

They must decide which side they are on.

Their reticence has undermined

The urban scenery, made its ambiguities

Look willful and tired, the games of an old man.

What we need now is this unlikely

Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed

Castle. Your argument, Francesco,

Had begun to grow stale as no answer

Or answers were forthcoming. If it dissolves now

Into dust, that only means its time had come

Some time ago, but look now, and listen:

It may be that another life is stocked there

In recesses no one knew of; that it,

Not we, are the change; that we are in fact it

If we could get back to it, relive some of the way

It looked, turn our faces to the globe as it sets

And still be coming out all right:

Nerves normal, breath normal. Since it is a metaphor

Made to include us, we are a part of it and

Can live in it as in fact we have done,

Only leaving our minds bare for questioning

We now see will not take place at random

But in an orderly way that means to menace

Nobody--the normal way things are done,

Like the concentric growing up of days

Around a life: correctly, if you think about it.

A breeze like the turning of a page

Brings back your face: the moment

Takes such a big bite out of the haze

Of pleasant intuition it comes after.

The locking into place is "death itself,"

As Berg said of a phrase in Mahler's Ninth;

Or, to quote Imogen in Cymbeline, "There cannot

Be a pinch in death more sharp than this," for,

Though only exercise or tactic, it carries

The momentum of a conviction that had been building.

Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it

Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains

The white precipitate of its dream

In the climate of sighs flung across our world,

354

A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that

What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific

Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form

Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.

The light sinks today with an enthusiasm

I have known elsewhere, and known why

It seemed meaningful, that others felt this way

Years ago. I go on consulting

This mirror that is no longer mine

For as much brisk vacancy as is to be

My portion this time. And the vase is always full

Because there is only just so much room

And it accommodates everything. The sample

One sees is not to be taken as

Merely that, but as everything as it

May be imagined outside time--not as a gesture

But as all, in the refined, assimilable state.

But what is this universe the porch of

As it veers in and out, back and forth,

Refusing to surround us and still the only

Thing we can see? Love once

Tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible,

Though mysteriously present, around somewhere.

But we know it cannot be sandwiched

Between two adjacent moments, that its windings

Lead nowhere except to further tributaries

And that these empty themselves into a vague

Sense of something that can never be known

Even though it seems likely that each of us

Knows what it is and is capable of

Communicating it to the other. But the look

Some wear as a sign makes one want to

Push forward ignoring the apparent

NaÏveté of the attempt, not caring

That no one is listening, since the light

Has been lit once and for all in their eyes

And is present, unimpaired, a permanent anomaly,

Awake and silent. On the surface of it

There seems no special reason why that light

Should be focused by love, or why

The city falling with its beautiful suburbs

Into space always less clear, less defined,

Should read as the support of its progress,

The easel upon which the drama unfolded

To its own satisfaction and to the end

Of our dreaming, as we had never imagined

It would end, in worn daylight with the painted

Promise showing through as a gage, a bond.

355

This nondescript, never-to-be defined daytime is

The secret of where it takes place

And we can no longer return to the various

Conflicting statements gathered, lapses of memory

Of the principal witnesses. All we know

Is that we are a little early, that

Today has that special, lapidary

Todayness that the sunlight reproduces

Faithfully in casting twig-shadows on blithe

Sidewalks. No previous day would have been like this.

I used to think they were all alike,

That the present always looked the same to everybody

But this confusion drains away as one

Is always cresting into one's present.

Yet the "poetic," straw-colored space

Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,

Its darkening opposite--is this

Some figment of "art," not to be imagined

As real, let alone special? Hasn't it too its lair

In the present we are always escaping from

And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days

Pursues its uneventful, even serene course?

I think it is trying to say it is today

And we must get out of it even as the public

Is pushing through the museum now so as to

Be out by closing time. You can't live there.

The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how:

Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime

To learn and are reduced to the status of

Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates

Are rare. That is, all time

Reduces to no special time. No one

Alludes to the change; to do so might

Involve calling attention to oneself

Which would augment the dread of not getting out

Before having seen the whole collection

(Except for the sculptures in the basement:

They are where they belong).

Our time gets to be veiled, compromised

By the portrait's will to endure. It hints at

Our own, which we were hoping to keep hidden.

We don't need paintings or

Doggerel written by mature poets when

The explosion is so precise, so fine.

Is there any point even in acknowledging

The existence of all that? Does it

Exist? Certainly the leisure to

Indulge stately pastimes doesn't,

356

Any more. Today has no margins, the event arrives

Flush with its edges, is of the same substance,

Indistinguishable. "Play" is something else;

It exists, in a society specifically

Organized as a demonstration of itself.

There is no other way, and those assholes

Who would confuse everything with their mirror games

Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or

At least confuse issues by means of an investing

Aura that would corrode the architecture

Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery,

Are beside the point. They are out of the game,

Which doesn't exist until they are out of it.

It seems like a very hostile universe

But as the principle of each individual thing is

Hostile to, exists at the expense of all the others

As philosophers have often pointed out, at least

This thing, the mute, undivided present,

Has the justification of logic, which

In this instance isn't a bad thing

Or wouldn't be, if the way of telling

Didn't somehow intrude, twisting the end result

Into a caricature of itself. This always

Happens, as in the game where

A whispered phrase passed around the room

Ends up as something completely different.

It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike

What the artist intended. Often he finds

He has omitted the thing he started out to say

In the first place. Seduced by flowers,

Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though

Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining

He had a say in the matter and exercised

An option of which he was hardly conscious,

Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions.

So as to create something new

For itself, that there is no other way,

That the history of creation proceeds according to

Stringent laws, and that things

Do get done in this way, but never the things

We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately

To see come into being. Parmigianino

Must have realized this as he worked at his

Life-obstructing task. One is forced to read

The perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose

Into the smooth, perhaps even bland (but so

Enigmatic) finish. Is there anything

To be serious about beyond this otherness

357

That gets included in the most ordinary

Forms of daily activity, changing everything

Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter

Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation

Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near

Peak, too close to ignore, too far

For one to intervene? This otherness, this

"Not-being-us" is all there is to look at

In the mirror, though no one can say

How it came to be this way. A ship

Flying unknown colors has entered the harbor.

You are allowing extraneous matters

To break up your day, cloud the focus

Of the crystal ball. Its scene drifts away

Like vapor scattered on the wind. The fertile

Thought-associations that until now came

So easily, appear no more, or rarely. Their

Colorings are less intense, washed out

By autumn rains and winds, spoiled, muddied,

Given back to you because they are worthless.

Yet we are such creatures of habit that their

Implications are still around en permanence, confusing

Issues. To be serious only about sex

Is perhaps one way, but the sands are hissing

As they approach the beginning of the big slide

Into what happened. This past

Is now here: the painter's

Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving

Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned

Frequency, but the hues have turned metallic,

The curves and edges are not so rich. Each person

Has one big theory to explain the universe

But it doesn't tell the whole story

And in the end it is what is outside him

That matters, to him and especially to us

Who have been given no help whatever

In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely

On second-hand knowledge. Yet I know

That no one else's taste is going to be

Any help, and might as well be ignored.

Once it seemed so perfect--gloss on the fine

Freckled skin, lips moistened as though about to part

Releasing speech, and the familiar look

Of clothes and furniture that one forgets.

This could have been our paradise: exotic

Refuge within an exhausted world, but that wasn't

In the cards, because it couldn't have been

The point. Aping naturalness may be the first step

358

Toward achieving an inner calm

But it is the first step only, and often

Remains a frozen gesture of welcome etched

On the air materializing behind it,

A convention. And we have really

No time for these, except to use them

For kindling. The sooner they are burnt up

The better for the roles we have to play.

Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,

Offer it no longer as shield or greeting,

The shield of a greeting, Francesco:

There is room for one bullet in the chamber:

Our looking through the wrong end

Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed

Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately

Among the features of the room, an invitation

Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"

Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely

Enough how it wasn't. Its existence

Was real, though troubled, and the ache

Of this waking dream can never drown out

The diagram still sketched on the wind,

Chosen, meant for me and materialized

In the disguising radiance of my room.

We have seen the city; it is the gibbous

Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen

On its balcony and are resumed within,

But the action is the cold, syrupy flow

Of a pageant. One feels too confined,

Sifting the April sunlight for clues,

In the mere stillness of the ease of its

Parameter. The hand holds no chalk

And each part of the whole falls off

And cannot know it knew, except

Here and there, in cold pockets

Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustrations for Chapter II

Illustration I.i.

Sir George Beaumont’s Piel Castle in a Storm (1805) in Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth

Museum. Oil on canvas; 34x49 cm.

360

Illustration I.ii.

Anonymous from Gentleman’s Magazine, London (1749). Image reproduced from

www.oldworldauctions.com (Auction number 086). Engraving on paper; 11x11 cm.

361

Illustration I.iii.

John Flaxman’s The Shield of Achilles (1821) (presented to His Majesty George IV) in Royal Collection, London. Gold and silver gilt: 93 cm.

362

Illustration I.iv.

Renold Elstrack’s engraving on the frontispiece of Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614). (Corbett and

Lightbown Illustration 19).

363

Illustration I.v.

The rotation “The Mind” follows while ekphrasizing on Elstrack’s engraving.

364

Illustration I.vi.

Sir Peter Lely’s Charles I 1600-49 and James Duke of York 1633-1701 (1647) in the Private Collection of the

Duke of Northumberland at Syon House. Oil on canvas; 70x60 cm.

365

Illustration I.vii.

The vertical axis and the two sections of Sir Peter Lely’s Charles I 1600-49 and James Duke of York 1633-1701

(1647).

366

Illustration I.viii.

The axes of gaze and the hand gestures of Sir Peter Lely’s Charles I 1600-49 and James Duke of York 1633-1701

(1647).

367

Illustration I.ix.

Nicholas Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus (1628) in the Louvre Museum. Oil on canvas; 74x100 cm.

368

Illustrations for Chapter III

Illustration II.i.

Title page from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789).

369

Illustration II.ii.

The page of the poem entitled “The Tiger” from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789).

370

Illustration II.iii.

William Blake’s memorial stone in Bunhill Fields, London.

371

Illustration II.iv.

William Etty’s Nude in a Landscape (1820) in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles). Oil on paper mounted

on masonite; 44.92 x 53.66 cm.

372

Illustration II.v.

John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (1812) in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Los

Angeles). Oil on canvas; 175 x 224 cm.

373

Illustration II.vi.

J.A.D. Ingres’s The Grand Odalisque (1814) in the Louvre Museum. Oil on canvas; 91 x 162 cm.

374

Illustration II.vii.

Marmaduke Craddock’s A Peacock, Hens, Fowl and other Birds in a Wooded River Landscape (early eighteenth

century) in the South Kensington Gallery (London). Oil on canvas; 79 x 107 cm.

375

Illustration II.viii.

Henry Alken’s Shooting Partridge over Dogs (1825) in the Bridgeman Art Library (London). Oil on canvas; 35 x

50 cm.

376

Illustration II.ix.

William M. Harnett’s After the Hunt (1883) in the Mildred Anna Williams Collection (New York). Oil on

canvas; 185 cm x 93 cm.

377

Illustration II.x.

John Keats’s untitled engraving (1819-1820?). Ink on paper (Motion Plate 12)

378

Illustration II.xi.

Anon. Flemish Painter’s Medusa (1600 ca.) in the Uffizi Gallery (Florence). Oil on wood; 49 cm x 74 cm.

379

Illustration II.xii.

Caravaggio’s The Head of Medusa (1597) in the Uffizi Gallery (Florence). Oil on canvas mounted on wood; 60

cm x 55 cm.

380

Illustration II.xiii.

Titian’s Le Cocert Champêtre (The Pastoral Concert) (1508-1509 ca.) in the Louvre Museum. Oil on canvas; 110

cm x 138 cm.

381

Illustration II.xiv.

The vertical axes and the five sections of Titian’s Le Cocert Champêtre (The Pastoral Concert) (1508-1509 ca.).

in the Louvre Museum. Oil on canvas; 110 cm x 138 cm.

382

Illustration II.xv.

Angolo Bronzino’s Lucrezia de Cosimo de Medici (1560-1565 ca). Private Collection (Medici Gallery, Florence);

Oil on canvas; 49 cm x 93 cm.

383

Illustrations for Chapter III

Illustration III.i.

René Magriette’s La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images) (1928-1929). Los Angeles County

Museum of Arts (California); Oil on canvas; 63,5 cm x 93,9 cm.

384

Illustration III.ii.

William Blake’s Ancient of Days (1794). The British Museum; Relief etching watercolour on paper; 23,3 cm x

16,8 cm.

385

Illustration III.iii.

Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558 ca.). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels); Oil on

canvas; 73,5 cm x 112 cm.

386

Illustration III.iv.

Peter Brueghel the Younger (?)’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1595 ca.). Museé de Van Buuren (Brussels);

Oil on wood; 63 cm x 90 cm.

387

Illustration III.v.

Detail from Peter Brueghel the Younger (?)’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1595 ca.). Museé de Van

Buuren (Brussels); Oil on wood; 63 cm x 90 cm.

388

Illustration III.vi.

Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559). Sttatliche Museen (Berlin); Oil on oak panel; 117 cm

x 163 cm.

389

Illustration III.vii.

Peter Brueghel the Elder’s The Census at Bethlehem (1566). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels); Oil on canvas;

116 cm x 164,5 cm.

390

Illustration III.viii.

Referred spots in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s The Census at Bethlehem (1566). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels);

Oil on canvas; 116 cm x 164,5 cm.

391

Illustration III.ix.

Referred spots displaying Mary, Joseph, and the Hapsburg cote of arms in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s The Census

at Bethlehem (1566). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels); Oil on canvas; 116 cm x 164,5 cm.

392

Illustration III.x.

Detail from Peter Brueghel the Elder’s The Census at Bethlehem (1566). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels); Oil

on canvas; 116 cm x 164,5 cm.

393

Illustration III.xi.

Indifferent figures in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558 ca.). Museé des Beaux

Arts (Brussels); Oil on canvas; 73,5 cm x 112 cm.

394

Illustration III.xii.

Detail from Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558 ca.). Museé des Beaux Arts

(Brussels); Oil on canvas; 73,5 cm x 112 cm.

395

Illustration III.xiii.

Detail from Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558 ca.). Museé des Beaux Arts

(Brussels); Oil on canvas; 73,5 cm x 112 cm.

396

Illustration III.xiv.

Horizontal axis and the centralised figure in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558

ca.). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels); Oil on canvas; 73,5 cm x 112 cm.

397

Illustration III.xv.

Horizontal and vertical axes and the centralised figure in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s The Census at Bethlehem

(1566). Museé des Beaux Arts (Brussels); Oil on canvas; 116 cm x 164,5 cm.

398

Illustration III.xvi.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Kermess (Peasant Dance) (1568 ca.). Kunsthhistorisches Museum (Vienna); Oil

on panel; 114 cm x 164 cm.

399

Illustration III.xvii.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Corn Harvest (1565). The Metropolitan Museum (New York); Oil on panel; 160

cm x 118 cm.

400

Illustration III.xviii.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (The Return of the Hunters) (1565). Kunsthhistorisches

Museum (Vienna); Oil on wood; 162 cm x 117 cm.

401

Illustration III.xix.

Paolo Uccello’s A Hunt in the Forest (The Hunt by Night) (1470 ca.). Ashmolean Museum (Oxford); Tempera on

wood; 165 cm x 65 cm.

402

Illustration III.xx.

Vanishing point in Paolo Uccello’s A Hunt in the Forest (The Hunt by Night) (1470 ca.). Ashmolean Museum

(Oxford); Tempera on wood; 165 cm x 65 cm.

403

Illustration II.xxi.

Colour and brightness levels in Paolo Uccello’s A Hunt in the Forest (The Hunt by Night) (1470 ca.). Ashmolean

Museum (Oxford); Tempera on wood; 165 cm x 65 cm.

404

Illustration III.xxii.

Distribution of figures in Paolo Uccello’s A Hunt in the Forest (The Hunt by Night) (1470 ca.). Ashmolean

Museum (Oxford); Tempera on wood; 165 cm x 65 cm.

405

Illustration III.xxiii.

Parmigianino’s Self-Portraint in a Covex Mirror (1524 ca.). Kunsthhistorisches Museum (Vienna); Oil on wood;

24,4 cm.

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