Abstract
A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.
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Notes
Hollander, J. (1995). The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, University of Chicago Press.
Between drafting this essay and publishing it I saw in Florence in the Chiesa di Santo Spirito dei Padri an altar of frontal 18 ‘zingers’ or halo’d birds by Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli (1439–82); and 22+4 1/2 such zingers on a similar frontal by Giovanni Cianfanini (1462–1542). I do not recall having seen anywhere else such a plurality of representations of the Holy Spirit.
Krieger, M. (1992). Ekphrasis: The illusion of the natural sign (Emblems by Joan Krieger). Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.
Edward Hopper and the American Imagination, by Deborah Lyons & Adam D. Weinberg, ed. Julie Grau, Whitney Museum of Art in association with W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London, 1995. John Hollander’s poem ‘Sun in an Empty Room’, pp. 87–88. Plate 59. The un-poemed Francisco de Zurbarán, 1598–1664, A Cup of Water and a Rose on a Silver Plate c.1630 (National Gallery London), on Plenty’s dustcover is – almost – speaking and spoken of in Hollander’s ‘Light Glass Still-Life’ in The New Yorker Sept 23, 2002, pp. 72–73. Zurbarán’s double-handled cup is porcelain, and full: Hollander addresses/is addressed by ‘An empty tumbler/half filled with the troubled light/of a winter dawn,...’
John Hollander, ‘Light Glass Still-Life’ The New Yorker, Sept. 23, 2002, pp. 72–73. (See note 4 above).
‘A Melody by Scarlatti’, see Verses & a Comedy by Aldous Huxley, Chatto & Windus, London, 1946. On this see my paper, ‘Meaning and Simultaniety in Poetry’ in Proceedings of the Tenth Conference of AULLA [Australasian Universities’ Languages and Literature Association] Auckland University Press, 1966, pp. 294–300.
The Sister Arts: the Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray, by Jean A. Hagstrum, The University of Chicago Press, 1950. My copy is a ‘Midway Reprint’ of 1974. For ec[k]phrasis see ‘notes’ on pages: 18, 23, ref on p. 29, 39 and 40, ref.
‘ “Words after Speech”, Phenomenology and Symbol in T.S. Eliot’s Quartets’, by P Æ Hutchings, in Philosophical Studies Vol XXII, 1973, National University of Ireland; pp.17–37. I had at the time of the first draft of this piece not yet read Krieger’s seminal, ‘Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry’, (1967): I had already published a paper more or less on the topic in 1966. (See note 6 above). Kreiger and I were after the same quarry, a world apart, on the Western edges of two continents. The footnote to my Philosophical Studies article continues:
How far Eliot was acquainted with this line of argument I am not able to say: he could have read it in Lotze, whom Maher quotes:
Any comparison of two ideas, which ends by finding their contents like or unlike, presupposes the absolutely indivisible unity of that which compares them: it must be one and the same thing which first forms the idea of a, then that of b, and which at the same time is conscious of the difference between them...[Our inner world is] a world in which [the] individual [items] are held together and arranged by the relating activity of [a] single pervading principle – Metaphysic, by Hermann Lotze (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1887, 2 Vols.) Vol. 11, p. 170 § 241. [Maher was published by Longmans, London, 1919/25: c.f. p.468. Italic mine.]
Lotze is a likely enough author for Eliot to have read, though his name does not appear in the Index to Eliot’s Harvard thesis, Knowledge and Experience (London, Faber, 1964): less likely is Balmes. However Balmes’s celebrated dissection of Kant’s First Paralogism was available in an American translation by Henry Brownson, and Eliot could, conceivably, have read it in the course of his philosophical studies, though there is no evidence that he did: Fundamental Philosophy, by the Rev. James Balmes, trans. Henry F. Brownson, 2 Vols. (N.Y., Sadleir, 1856). The references which Maher gives to this are mistaken – there is not a Book XI, and he presumably intended Book IX.
It is interesting to notice that Balmes makes a phenomenological point, ... ‘We think with instantaneousness, which defies the succession of words, however rapid we may suppose them to be... We experience often enough the instantaneous occurrence of a multitude of ideas, which afterwards we develop in discourse...’ ... See Balmes, op. cit. Vol. II, Bk. IV, Ch. XXVIII, p. 109, § 179–180. [One may usefully compare Balmes with Ortega y Gasset, ‘To be conscious is not to be in time’, and with Gasset’s notion that ‘...ideas possess the most extraordinary condition of being nowhere in the world, of being outside all place...’: in ‘The Self and the Other’, q.v., The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays (NY, Doubleday/Anchor, n.d.) p.167. (Essay published first in Partisan Review 1949/52.)] To escape into the self is to escape from things, and out of their place.
The burden of all this is that the mere phenomenon of the virtual simultaneity of meaning as something which obtains despite its serial medium, may be developed, by a philosopher, into evidence for the simplicity, then for the immortality and possible eternity, of the psyche. Less dramatic than mystical ‘eternal moments’, reading-presents points beyond themselves into the realm of metaphysics. We may suppose Eliot to have been aware, at least generally if not explicitly, of this kind of argument from the psyche’s behaviour to the soul’s nature. [I am indebted to Fr John Begley, S.J. for much valuable information on these matters.]
Footnote 28 to the article cited. Ortega y Gasset, note 31, article cited.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria, Chapter XV: ed Shawcross (O.U.P. 1907 etc) Vol. II, pp. 16 ff. Old ‘Everyman’ ed, ed Arthur Symons, pp. 169–170: New ‘Everyman’, ed George Watson, pp. 177–178 (etc). [‘The truly imaginative, what is it? For Coleridge [and] for Herder it has something to do with sensuous presentation, and as a consequence, with the virtual simultaneity of “a whole created through time” whose impact is as it were instantaneous and so, to a degree, iconic.’ See ‘Imagination: “as the sun paints in the camera obscura” ’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXIX/1, Fall, 1970, III, p.66, col. a.]
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Hutchings, P. Speaking to Pictures. SOPHIA 46, 79–89 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0001-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0001-z