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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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• List of Illustrations(p. vi)
• Acknowledgments(p. vii)
• Introduction(p. x)
• Part 1 The Portrait Poem to 1912
• 1 Portraiture in the Rossetti Circle: Window, Object, or Mirror(p. 17)
• 2 Ezra Pound: Portraiture and Originality(p. 48)
• 3 T. S. Eliot: Getting Out of the Picture(p. 76)
• Part 2 Modulations 1912 to 1922
• 4 Contraction: From Picture Sonnet to Epigram(p. 113)
• 5 Expansion: Ezra Pound and Avant-Garde Portraiture(p. 144)
• 6 Pastoral Mode: William Carlos Williams and Nativist Portraiture(p. 183)
• Coda: Rossetti and E. E. Cummings(p. 213)
• Notes(p. 219)
• Selected Bibliography(p. 245)
• Index(p. 253)

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CHOICE Review

Those who adhere to Virginia Woolf's viewpoint believe there is no connection between the Victorians and the modernists, that the modernists totally broke with their past. Dickey (Univ. of Missouri) lucidly and strongly disproves this idea. Combining literary and art theory in constructing her argument, the author suggests ways of "reading" the paintings and "looking" at the poetry. Although she focuses on Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, she includes many literary and artistic figures associated with portraiture. Throughout her inquiry, she explores such issues as gender--in this connection noting, for example, that portrait poems about men usually focus on heroic deeds of famous men whereas artistic and poetic portraits of women usually focus on the physical beauty and interiority of an anonymous woman, commonly showing her self-absorbed, often with a blank expression indicating little interior substance. However, Dickey's main achievement is proving that the modernist portrait poem is actually an extension of the Victorian. She even shows a connection between such disparate poets as Rossetti and e. e. cummings. This narrowly focused book will be of interest to students of both literature and art. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. L. J. Larson Our Lady of the Lake University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

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