MA MODULE: SPRING 2011

Poetry and the Visual Arts: Victorian, Modern, Post-Modern

Tutor: Hugh Haughton
Starting from Charles Baudelaire,The Painter of Modern Life, modern poetry
has had a crucial investment in the visual arts and their relationship to the culture of
modernity. In Relations between Poetry and Painting, Wallace Stevens talked of the
paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and
modern art. The formal innovations and developments of Victorian and modern
poetry were often played out in dialogue with and response to the revolution in
painting. This module will look at a series of influential encounters between poets and
painting from the mid nineteenth-century to the present, moving from the time of
Ruskin and Pre-Raphaelitism, or Baudelaire and Realism, through the moments of
cubism and modernism, associated with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens among
other poets, through the poets of the New York School, including Frank OHara and
John Ashbery, and on to post-modernism and the poets of today.
This was a period of technical and formal revolution and redefinition change
in the visual arts and poets were acutely conscious of parallel developments in
painting, sculpture, photography, architecture and film in approaching their own
medium. As a result of the transformations recorded in Walter Benjamin seminal
essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, this was also a
period in which, as Donald Davie said, the whole of the artistic past became
available to painter, sculptor, architect, musician, as never before, and this lent a
new dimension to modern poetry as well as other cultural forms. Beginning with the
painting-oriented verse of Browning and the painter poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the
module will investigate a series of close encounters between poets and the visual arts
from the mid nineteenth-century to the present. It will involve readings of poems and
essays by a variety of representative British, Irish and American poets, including
Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth
Bishop, Frank OHara, John Ashbery, and contemporary poets including Derek
Mahon, Derek Walcott (in Another Life), Richard Howard and Jorie Graham. Poetic
engagement with the visual arts takes many forms, including ekphrasis, imitation,
allusion, and what Stevens calls effects of analogy. It has been used to generate
cultural critique, critical commentary, essays on poetics, autobiographical reflections,
and many other things, but above all, as triggers to poems as objects. The module will
investigate a spectrum of poems and poets across the period, introducing students to
the metamorphoses of pictorial and poetic art, reflected in the work of the poets
studied.
This is very much a course on modern poetry, as it moves from Victorian
through modernism to the contemporary. It will dwelling in and upon poems, though
mainly poems that dwell on or reflect upon the visual arts. Expertise in Art History is
welcome but not required, since we will be looking primarily at poetic form, the
poetics of vision, and the linguistic medium of modern poems, rather than the plastic
arts as such. The focus is on the ongoing competitive dialogue between the two art
forms during a period of huge inventiveness as well as crisis in the arts (painting,
photography, sculpture, cinema but also poetry).
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1) Robert Browning and the Portrait Gallery
Men and Women, Robert Brownings defining volume, appeared in 1855, the year
before the opening of the National Portrait Gallery. The seminar will look at
Brownings pictorial investments in relation to Victorian art theory, reconstructions of
Renaisssance Painting, the phenomenon of the picture gallery, and poetics. Starting
from dramatic monologues such as My Last Duchess, Filippo Lippi and Andrea
del Sarto, which we will read in relation to art historical sources, we will also look at
Old Pictures in Florence, In a Balcony, The Guardian Angel, A Likeness, One
Word More and other poems which turn upon painters, paintings, spectatorship, and
the gallery. See also A.W. Heffernan, The Museum of Words: The Poetry of Ekphrasis
from Homer to Ashbery (2004); Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, ed. Victorian
Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (1995).
2) D.G. Rossetti: Painting Poetry and Poems for Paintings.
D.G. Rossetti is a rare case of a poet who was also a painter. He is also the first
English poet to systematically compose what he called in The Germ (1950) and in The
House of Life, poems for paintings, poems that offer ekphrastic commentaries on
particular works of visual art. These include what Jerome McGann calls double
works, poems that are paired with particular paintings of his own, sometimes
incorporated into their frame, as well as poems about the art of others including
sonnets about paintings by Titian, Leonardo, Mantegna, Botticelli and Ingres as well
as art in general. The seminar will investigate the relationship between the historically
double programme of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in the visual arts to return to
medieval and early Renaissance aesthetics and iconography and to renovate modern
English art on more naturalistic Ruskinian lines and the poetics of the sonnet in
Rossettis great sequence The House of Life in relation to his Early Italian Poets
(1861). We will look at Rossettis sonnets in relation to his paintings and those of
Leonardo and others he wrote about as well as his sister Christina Rossettis sonnet
on The Artists Studio, and Michael Fields Sight and Song (1892), with its aim to
translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in
themselves. Beside the poems, you should read Paters essays on The Aesthetic
School and D.G. Rossetti as well as The School of Giorgione (from The
Renaissance). The best modern study of the subject is Elizabeth Helsinger, Poetry and
the Pre-Raphaelite Arts (2008).
3) Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life: Translating Painting,
Translating Symbolism.
Baudelaire said his aim was to 'glorify the cult of images (my great, unique and
primitive passion)' ['glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma
primitive passion)'. His essay on Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne is one of the classic
statements of aesthetic modernity for all the arts, but takes off from visual art. The
same is true of many of his poems, including Bohmiens en voyage, Duellum
(Duellum), Le Masque (The Mask), Une gravure fantastique (A Fantastic
Engraving), Le Jeu, (The Game) Sur Le Tasse en prison (On Tasso in Prison),
Provisional Seminar Programme:
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Don Juan aux enfers (Don Juan in Hell), which are all triggered by paintings or
drawing. His poem Les Phares (The Light-houses) is a brief history of art,
focussed around particular painters, which are viewed as beacons. Though he was an
admirer of Delacroix, his essay on the painting of modern life is based on the little
known sketches and drawings of the journalistic commentator Constantin Guys, and
many of his essays are about caricature and the comic in art. See J.A. Hiddleston, Art
and its Representation in Rosemary Lloyd ed. Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire
(CUP, 2006)
The seminar will look at Baudelaires poems and essays together, as well as
T.S. Eliots Baudelaire in Sacred Wood and Selected Essays and Walter Benjamins
essay on Baudelaire The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire and Baudelaire
or the Streets of Paris from Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism. Translated Harry Zohn (NLB, 1973). You should also read selected
poems by Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, A Station in the Metro, T.S. Eliots The
Waste Land I.
4) American Poetry and visual modernism: Marianne Moore, William Carlos
Williams, Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy:
In 1918, Moore wrote to Pound from New York, saying: Over here, it strikes me that
there is more evidence of power among painters and sculptors than among writers.
Williams said, I have attempted to fuse the poetry and the painting, to make it the
same thing. Starting with Stieglitz and the New York Armory Show, the seminar will
look at the poetry of three American modernist poets, all of whom were acutely
responsive to the revolution in the visual arts as well as literature. It will concentrate
on poems by Moore and Williams (including Pictures from Breughel), as well as
Steins Tender Buttons and poems by Loy. See also, Bram Dijkstras The
Hieroglyphiscs of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William
Carlos Williams and Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts (1995).
5) W. H. Auden, Le Muse des Beaux Arts; W.B. Yeats, Leda and the
Swan, The Municipal Gallery Revisited; Wallace Stevens and The Man
with the Blue Guitar; Elizabeth Bishop, Poem
Audens poem is perhaps the first fully-fledged twentieth-century ekphrastic poem, as
well as the first (alongside Yeats) to be named after a gallery. Taking off from Auden
and Yeats, we will largely focus on selected poems by Wallace Stevens. Stevens
The Man With the Blue Guitar, written after Picasso, notes that things as they are/
Are changed upon the blue guitar, and as Bonnie Costello observes, while his
painting abounds in references to particular artists and their works, it is finally the
idea of painting, its struggle to define an imaginative space with a presence to rival
natural experience, that attracts him. We will also look at In Relations between
Poetry and Painting (1951), Wallace Stevens talked of the paramount relation
between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, and his
poetry is pervaded by an awareness of the analogy between the visual arts and poetry
(he has another essay entitled Effects of Analogy). See Bonnie Costello, Effects of
Analogy: Wallace Stevens and Painting in Albert Gelpi ed, Wallace Stevens: The
Poetics of Modernism (1985).
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6) Frank OHara and the New York School:
Frank OHara worked as a gallery curator, operated as an art critic, and wrote as
friends of artists, and his poetry is caught up in a vortex of relationship to painting,
painters, and aesthetic theory. The seminar will look at his poetry in terms of his art
criticism on contemporary American painting by Jackson Pollock and others, and the
context of the art of the New York School more generally. Picasso made me tough
and quick, and the world, he wrote in Memorial Day 1950, an early poem that also
speaks of collages, and perfect mobiles, Fathers of Dada, and guitar strings that
hold up pictures. Though he later wrote a poem entitled Why I am Not a Painter,
many of his poems are responses to paintings (such as On Seeing Larry Rivers
Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art) or to his painter
friends in New York. Focussing on a reading of In Memory of My Feelings (for
Grace Hartigan) and other poems exploring the relation between contemporary
painting and culture, it will explore the relationship between OHaras I do this
poems and the new painting of the Abstract Expressionists and their successors in
New York. The main texts will be taken from Frank OHara, Selected Poems ed
Donald Allen (1974) and Frank OHara, Art Chronicles (1975, 1991). See also:
Marjorie Perloff, Frank OHara: A Poet among Painters (1977, Revised 1998), and
Russell Ferguson, In Memory of My Feelings: Frank OHara and American Art
(1999). Robert Motherwell ed The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology
(Cambridge, 1951)
7) John Ashbery: The Double Dream of Spring and Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror
Like OHara, Ashbery combines the role of poet and art critic, and has written
numerous poems in response to painting and adopting techniques borrowed from the
visual arts. We will consider his poems in relation to his relationship to European
Surrealism and Dadaism his bpoem The Double Dream of Spring alludes to De
Chirico - as well as to American painters such as Joseph Cornell and Fairfield Porter.
The seminar will concentrate on his long master-piece Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror, which reads a work of sixteenth-century mannerism by Parmigianino, in
terms of museum experience, art-historical documentation such as Vasaris Lives of
the Artists and contemporary art criticism and practice. Texts will be taken from
Selected Poems and Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles: 1957-1987 as well as his
Selected Prose. See also A.W. Heffernan, The Museum of Words: The Poetry of
Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (2004).
8) Contemporary Poets in the Gallery.
The seminar will look at the Caribbean poet Derek Walcotts long poem Another Life
and Tiepolos Hound alongside selected poems by contemporary American, British
and Irish poets, including Richard Howard, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Eavan
Boland and others, drawing on students particular interests.
H.H.
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Charles Altieri, Why Stevens Must Be Abstract, or What a Poet Can Learn from Painting, in
in Albert Gelpi ed, Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism (Cambridge: CUP, 1990)
Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge: CUP,
1989)
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Complex Mirror (1975)
John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 ed. David Bergman, Knopf
(New York: NY, 1989).
Guillaume Apollinaire, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918 trans. Susan
Suleiman (New York, 1972)
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal with a new translation by Richard Howard, (London:
Picador, 1982)
Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature (London: Penguin Classics,
2006)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations
ed. and with introduction by Hannah Arendt (London: Cape, 1970). trans. Harry Zohn.
Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007)
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, Prose and Letters Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, eds. (New
York: Library of America, 2008)
Elizabeth Bishop, Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, ed. with an Introduction by
William Benton (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996)
Yves Bonnefoy, Writings on Art
Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry (Berkeley: UCLA
Press, 1991)
Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual
Imagination (Berkely: UCLA Press, 1995).
T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes in the History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale,
1999)
T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New
Jersey,: Princeton University Press, 1999)
T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: artists and politics in France (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1973)
Bonnie Costello, Effects of Analogy: Wallace Stevens and Painting, in Albert Gelpi ed,
Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism (Cambridge: CUP, 1990)
Donald Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977)
Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of
William Carlos Williams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969)
Modern - torian, Modern, Post Reading List: Poetry and the Visual Arts: Vic
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Bram Dijkstra ed. A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists (New
York: New Directions, 1978)
Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: CUP, 2000)
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983) trans Arthur
Goldhammer
Daniel Halpern ed., Writers on Art (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988)
Anthony Hecht, Poetry and Painting, in On the Laws of Poetic Art (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995)
A.W. Heffernan, The Museum of Words: the Poetry of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993; repr. 2004)
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
Wiklliam Morris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008)
Timothy Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970)
John Hollander, The Gazers Spirit: Poems speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 1995)
John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (2
nd
ed, New Haven:
Yale, 1985)
Barbara Johnson, Romancing the Stone in Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008)
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, 1992)
Linda Leavell, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995)
Elizabeth Bergmann Louiseaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2003)
Elizabeth Bergmann Louiseaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (Cambridge:
CUP, 2009)
Andr Malraux, Museum without Walls (trans. of Les voix du silence, 1951)
William Marling, William Carlos Williams and the PIainters 1909-1923 (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1982)
J.D. McClatchy ed, Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century
Poets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
W.J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994)
W.J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986)
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Marianne Moore, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1981)
Marianne Moore, Complete Prose ed Patricia Willis (1986)
Michael North, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985)
Robert Motherwell ed., Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Bellknap Press, 1951)
Frank OHara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Ed. Donald Allen with an introduction
by John Ashbery (1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1971; Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995)
Frank OHara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966. (New York: G. Braziller, 1975)
Frank OHara, Jackson Pollock (New York: George Braziller, Inc. 1959)
Frank OHara Robert Motherwell: with selections from the artist's writings (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1965)
Marjorie Perloff, Frank OHara: A Poet among Painters (1977, Revised 1998)
David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France
(Cambridge, 1988)
Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature
and Painting (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982)
Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of
Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1955)
Wallace Stevens, Relations between Poetry and Painting, The Necessary Angel (1951)
Helen Vendler ed, Voices and Visions: The Poet in America (New York, 1987)
William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1951)
William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York, 1969)
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