MUSEUM OF WORDS: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery

by James A.W. Heffernan

• ISBN13: 9780226323145
• ISBN10: 0226323145
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures. In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

Author Biography

James A. W. Heffernan is a professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(8)
Chapter One HOMER, VIRGIL, DANTE	9	(37)
A GENEALOGY OF EKPHRASIS
I. Homer: A Shield Sculpted In Words	10	(12)
II. Virgil: Re-Imagining the Shield	22	(15)
III. Visible Speech: The Envoicing of Sculpture in Dante's Purgatorio	37	(9)
Chapter Two WEAVING RAPE	46	(45)
EKPHRASTIC METAMORPHOSES OF THE PHILOMELA MYTH FROM OVID TO SHAKESPEARE
I. Philomela's Graphic Tale	47	(6)
II. Verbalized Depictions of Rape in the Ancient Novel	53	(8)
III. Ekphrasis and Rape from Chaucer to Spenser	61	(13)
IV. The Painted Rape of Troy in Shakespeare's Lucrece	74	(17)
Chapter Three ROMANTIC EKPHRASIS	91	(44)
ICONOPHOBIA, ICONOPHILIA, AND THE IDEOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE
I. Wordsworth's "Peele Castle"	94	(13)
II. "All breathing human passion far above": Keats and the Urn	107	(8)
III. Disintegrating Sublimity, Petrified Beauty: Shelley's "Ozymandias" and "Medusa"	115	(9)
IV. Ideality and Fixity: Byron on Sculpture	124	(11)
Chapter Four MODERN AND POSTMODERN EKPHRASIS	135	(56)
ENTERING THE MUSEUM OF ART
I. Gaze and Glance in Browning's "My Last Duchess"	139	(7)
II. The Museum in Auden's "Musee"	146	(6)
III. The Breughel Museum of William Carlos Williams	152	(17)
IV. The Museum-Goer In the Mirror: Ashbery's "Self-Portrait"	169	(22)
Notes	191	(34)
Works Cited	225