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).

Provisional Seminar Programme: 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), 2

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).

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.

Reading List: Poetry and the Visual Arts: Victorian, Modern, Post-Modern
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)

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 (2nd 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)

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)