The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound

by Frances Dickey

Overview

In The Modern Portrait Poem, Frances Dickey recovers the portrait as a poetic genre from the 1860s through the 1920s. Combining literary and art history, she examines the ways Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. Whistler transformed the genre of portraiture in both painting and poetry. She then shows how their new ways of looking at and thinking about the portrait subject migrated across the Atlantic to influence Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, and other poets. These poets creatively exposed the Victorian portrait to new influences ranging from Manet’s realism to modern dance, Futurism, and American avant-garde art. They also condensed, expanded, and combined the genre with other literary modes including epitaph, pastoral, and Bildungsroman.

Dickey challenges the tendency to view Modernism as a break with the past and as a transition from aural to visual orientation. She argues that the Victorian poets and painters inspired the new generation of Modernists to test their vision of Aestheticism against their perception of modernity and the relationship between image and text. In bridging historical periods, national boundaries, and disciplinary distinctions, Dickey makes a case for the continuity of this genre over the Victorian/Modernist divide and from Britain to the United States in a time of rapid change in the arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813932637
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	06/29/2012
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Frances Dickey is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction x

Part 1 The Portrait Poem to 1912

1 Portraiture in the Rossetti Circle: Window, Object, or Mirror 17

2 Ezra Pound: Portraiture and Originality 48

3 T. S. Eliot: Getting Out of the Picture 76

Part 2 Modulations 1912 to 1922

4 Contraction: From Picture Sonnet to Epigram 113

5 Expansion: Ezra Pound and Avant-Garde Portraiture 144

6 Pastoral Mode: William Carlos Williams and Nativist Portraiture 183

Coda: Rossetti and E. E. Cummings 213

Notes 219

Selected Bibliography 245

Index 253

Editorial Reviews

Among the outstanding qualities of this book are its fruitful lines of inquiry, its careful and precise arguments, its deft and meticulous reading of poems and paintings, and its acute attention to historical and literary detail. Dickey’s book makes a lucid, engaging contribution to the study of literary Modernism and the visual arts.

Jahan Ramazani

This is a sweeping, smart, and creative study of the interaction between the artistic portrait and the modern ‘portrait’ poem by male artists from late-Victorian to modern. Frances Dickey extends a rich, deeply instilled knowledge of art history and modern poetics to their interface in a stunning trajectory spanning the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, Whistler, Futurist painting, Eliot, Pound, and the later Modernism of William Carlos Williams. She raises provocative questions concerning the relation between interiority and engagement, identity, gender, and the body while elucidating the shifting cultural milieu and changes in aesthetic form. A long overdue, exciting, rich, and informative book.

Cassandra Laity

"Among the outstanding qualities of this book are its fruitful lines of inquiry, its careful and precise arguments, its deft and meticulous reading of poems and paintings, and its acute attention to historical and literary detail. Dickey’s book makes a lucid, engaging contribution to the study of literary Modernism and the visual arts. "—Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia

"This is a sweeping, smart, and creative study of the interaction between the artistic portrait and the modern ‘portrait’ poem by male artists from late-Victorian to modern. Frances Dickey extends a rich, deeply instilled knowledge of art history and modern poetics to their interface in a stunning trajectory spanning the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, Whistler, Futurist painting, Eliot, Pound, and the later Modernism of William Carlos Williams. She raises provocative questions concerning the relation between interiority and engagement, identity, gender, and the body while elucidating the shifting cultural milieu and changes in aesthetic form. A long overdue, exciting, rich, and informative book. "—Cassandra Laity, Drew University

From the Publisher