ABSTRACT
Most accounts of ekphrasis as the verbal representation of a visual representation (in James Heffernan’s convenient definition) start from Homer’s virtuoso description of the forging of Achilles’s shield, a narrative episode in an epic poem. As a model this works well for ekphrastic passages in longer works, including novels. But much of the important ekphrastic poetry since the early nineteenth century is found in shorter works, where the ekphrasis is the poem: a set of conversational questions, addressed to a painting or a sculpture (which sometimes replies), bringing the work of art into what feels like close and personal relations with the poet and with readers.
The chapter argues that nineteenth-century poets followed other classical precedents (the ekphrastic epigram and the idyll) to develop what we might call the modern ekphrastic lyric. Between Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) and such twentieth-century ekphrastic lyrics as Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1908) or Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” (1976), the less-often discussed ekphrastic poetry of Tennyson, Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the two women who wrote as Michael Field allow us to explore the differing relations of the modern lyric poem with works of art in various media. Such poems invite us to consider more broadly what is happening to human relationships with objects, and through objects with other persons, in an age when the work of art is always at risk of becoming a commodity like any other. In these poems, ekphrasis mediates and personalizes the work of art, removing it from the context of the market to embed it in a network of relations among persons. For many of the poets, objects of art shared with others in and as poems foster ties of friendship and love elsewhere at risk. But the pictures these poets select for ekphrasis reveal something else: social relations that are often strangely distorted or broken. In poems, we might say with Bishop, the work of art is not a commodity but an occasion for intimacy against the odds.
