Ekphrasis Critics Flashcards
(28 cards)
The etymology of ekphrasis?
Ekphrasis, from ek-phrazein (Greek): to speak out
The two types of ekphrasis?
apostrophe: address to the artwork
prosopopeia: envoicing the artwork
Early definition of ekphrasis?
ut pictura poesis: ‘as is painting, so is poetry’
Horace (1st century BC)
Simple definition of ekphrasis?
‘a verbal representation of a visual representation’
James Heffernan, Museum of Words (1993)
Association between painting and poetry?
‘painting is mute poetry and poetry is a speaking picture’
Plutarch (2nd century AD, attributed to Simonides of Ceos, 6th century
BC)
The advantage of ekphrasis poetry?
‘the poem knows something or tells something that had been held back by the
silent image’
Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (2008)
We must write poems about paintings?
‘the all-at-onceness of the image is an incitement
to prosody’
T. J. Clark, ‘What is the burglar after?’ (2022)
The linear progress of paintings and poetry?
‘a poem aspires to the atemporal “eternity” of the stopped-action painting, or laments its inability to achieve it’
Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance (1988)
Different ways of looking at a picture?
‘I do not look at [a picture] as one looks at a thing. Rather than seeing it, I see
according to, or with it’
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1960)
Jorie Graham’s poem?
At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body (1983)
Where did Graham’s poem appear?
In her collection Erosion, where some of her most artful ekphrastic poems appear.
Graham’s poem stands out?
This poem stands out, as well as two others in her collection. ‘San Sepolcro’ and ‘Masaccio’s Expulsion’ - all three are based on Italian Renaissance paintings
What Graham’s poem actually is?
Willard Speigelman - ‘The poems are not so much imaginative re-creations of an object as they are unconventional fantasias
based upon an external, visual stimulus’
What does embodiment mean to Graham?
Darlene Bird - For Graham, being embodied means to be always on the
way to inhabiting that body, never to be fully and finally present.
What is Graham’s poem in response to?
Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body in Orvieto Cathedral
It captures religious meaning in the human body
Dates of Luca Signorelli?
1441 - 1523
Graham questions the purpose of the painting?
Helen Vendler - ‘the speaker in
Graham’s poem persistently questions the premise of the painting – that the
eagerness of the spirit to re-join the flesh is understandable and good’
Vincent Van Gogh poem?
The Starry Night by Anne Sexton (1962) responds to his painting of the same name
Who was Anne Sexton?
American poet known for her personal confessional verse which detailed her long battle with bipolar disorder and suicidal tendencies. She died by suicide in October 1974. Van Gogh died by suicide in July 1890.
Problematic content of The Starry Night?
Contemporary poet David Trinidad suggests it is a ‘celebration of the suicidal impulse’
The Starry Night appeals to lyric poetry?
John Stewart Mills - ‘poetry is overheard’ - common definition of lyric poetry
The Starry Night is similar to over poetry?
Similar thematic content to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1962) and Tulips (1961)
John Berryman’s short poem?
Winter Landscape (1940) is
based on Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, painted in 1565 as part
of an unfinished calendar cycle
How does Winter Landscape respond to the painting?
His poem is a “transposition d’art,” to use Gautier’s
term, the transference in words and meter of the formal values and compositional devices used by Bruegel in the representation of his winter scene
