Ekphrastic poetry- Literature inspired by Art

[chmpman]

I was wondering if any one may be able to suggest several poems that fall into this category. Time period and style do not matter at all, but I was hoping to find something that really stands out so that I may fulfill a class requirement and write an essay about some sort of ekphrastic poem. I would very much appreciate this. The more suggestions the merrier I may be.

[Psycheinaboat]

I'm just curious... would Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" count as ekphrastic?

[B-Mental]

Please to define the word ekphrastic, my dictionary has no such listing, and didn't find it in online dictionary. I may be able to point you in the correct direction.

[Nightshade]

snap psycheinaboat, I was going to say just that.

chapman heres a link to a list http://www.angelfire.com/ok/freshenglish/artpoetry.html

[mono]

I'm just curious... would Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" count as ekphrastic?
In my opinion, yes, it would. Others include "Tintern Abbey" and "Elegiac Stanzas" by William Wordsworth, "Musée de Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, "Pictures from Brueghel" by William Carlos Williams.
I can probably report more sometime soon, as these just came from the top of my head.
Good luck! :)

[Psycheinaboat]

I think "Ode on a Grecian Urn" would count.

This probably will not help, but everytime I hear Bob Dylan sing "Lay Lady Lay" I think of paintings done by Walter Sickert that show the female form, often nude, stretched across beds.

[chmpman]

'Ode to a Grecian Urn' definitely counts, as we discussed it in my class. The other recommendations I will have to check out. Ekphrastic literature is verse, prose, or fiction inspired by an actual or notional artistic representation. The class is geared towards understanding the relationship between visual art and the literature that can accompany it, exploring the limitations and strengths each medium can display. I'm only looking for literature inspired by visual art, so any poems about musical inspiration may not help. Thank you for the suggestions so far.

[B-Mental]

Thank you very much... I'll have to think about that.

[chmpman]

I would also like to open this thread to discussion of ekphrastic literature, as I can't say that I have seen anything of this sort elsewhere in the forums. Feel free to post your comments on any ekphrastic poems or stories that interest you.

[subterranean]

I haven't read much about this type of poem but, so far the ones I like are "Why I Am Not a Painter" by Frank O'Hara and "Nude Descending a Staircase" by X. J. Kennedy (on Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase)


WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters. "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.



Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair

[chmpman]

Thank you.

[chmpman]

I don't believe Wordsworth's "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" would be considered ecphrastic, as Mono posted. If the poem were really about the object of Tintern Abbey, and dwelt for a prolonged period on the significance of art as achitecture, I believe it would be. But the poem seems to me to be more about immersing oneself in nature, through experiences in nature, not art. I may be wrong though. Anyone else have an opinion, or care to share ecphrastic poems they enjoy?

[subterranean]

As I'm reading it, especially these two last lines:


And this green pastoral landscapes, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake

I'm thinking whether Wordsworth was actually reffering to God as the artist and the beautiful nature as His grand work of art. So it's not only about his expression and love of nature. But, that's only my opinion.

[subterranean]

I'm reading another poem by Wordsworth, in title of Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, painted by Sir George Beaumont . I don't know whether this one can be categorized as Ekphrastic poetry.

I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.
How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.

Ah! then , if mine had been the Painter's hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;--
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part,
A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

So once it would have been,--'tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

Not for a moment could I now behold
A smiling sea, and be what I have been:
The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old;
This, which I know, I speak with mind serene.

Then, Beaumont, Friend! who would have been the Friend,
If he had lived, of Him whom I deplore,
This work of thine I blame not, but commend;
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.

O 'tis a passionate Work!--yet wise and well,
Well chosen is the spirit that is here;
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,
This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear!

And this huge Castle, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.

Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied; for 'tis surely blind.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.--
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn

[litlover]

Maybe Larkin's 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album' would fit the bill.

'But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing lines...'

Or a poet from here in the north of Ireland, John Hewitt (1907-1987) whose work grounds him in this place but also elevates and takes him (as we hope all our work does) across boundaries of imagination with skillful leaps into the hinterland of creation with words as companions on epic journeys which may be only a little description of a corner shop or a frosted hedgerow.
Anyway, the one I have in mind is 'The Municipal Gallery revisited, October 1954'.
It opens;

'Brisk from autumn of the sunlit square,
to overbrim a day already full,
because some exhibition drew me there,
the mannered essays of the latest school,
I stumbled into history unaware,
pausing a moment in the vestibule,
among the crowding presences again,
facing disarmed the stone and metal men:'

Hope these are the sort of thing you meant, and if not, they are worth reading anyway.
Good luck with the search.

LL

[chmpman]

These are exactly what I was looking for. In fact I had chosen Elegiac Stanzas to write my essay on. It's interesting how he starts out explaining what he would have done differently for the picture, but comes to appreciate the feelings the artist may have meant to express.

[chmpman]

Can anyone suggest any ekphrastic poems other than English poets writing on English paintings? I would very much appreciate this bit of help.

[chmpman]

I'm still looking for ecphrastic poems if anyone may be able to help.

[Basil]

Fugitive poet Donald Davidson wrote "On a Replica of the Parthenon," inspired by the imitation parthenon built in Nashville, Tennesee for the 1896 World Fair:

ON A REPLICA OF THE PARTHENON

Why do they come? What do they seek
Who build but never read their Greek?
The classic stillness of a pool
Beleaguered in its certitude
By aimless motors that can make
Only incertainty more sure;
And where the willows crowd the pure
Expanse of clouds and blue that stood
Around the gables Athens wrought,
Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
And never heed the brandished spear
Or feel the bright-eyed maiden's rage
Whose gaze the sparrows violate;
But the sky drips its spectral dirt,
And gods, like men, to soot revert.
Gone is the mild, the serene air.
The golden years are come too late.
Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,
But what blind motion what dim last
Regret of men who slew their past
Raised up this bribe against their fate.

http://postcards.daisyfield.com/lores/TNNashvilleParthenonc1911.jpg

I don't think he was a fan.

[chmpman]

I like that one, but this part seems a bit foggy to me:

"Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
And never heed the brandished spear
Or feel the bright-eyed maiden's rage
Whose gaze the sparrows violate"

[blp]

As far as I know, the Wallace Stevens poem 'Man with a Blue Guitar' is inspired by an early Picasso (blue period, natch) of the same name:


One

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."

Two

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If a serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Three

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

Four

Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentarily declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

[blp]

Do poems inspired by other poems count? John Ashbery's 'The Portrait of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers' is inspired by a Marvell poem of almost exactly the same name.

[chmpman]

The term ecphrastic is meant to define literature inspired by a concrete object, so not as ecphrastic lit., although it is literature inspired by art, of some sort. John Ashberry's "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" is a good one, based on a painting by the same name, but it's a bit too long to post here.

[chmpman]

I like the Wallace Stevens poem, in its entirety, which is quite long. It's an interesting take on some theories behind modern art, about new realities and relationships between spectator and creator, although these are hardly 'modern' concepts.

[bittersticky]

Here's a goody. "Leda and the Swan" by yeats. and here is a link to an excellent essay that would be much help. It will eventually go into very specific detail about the links between the poem and various works of art but especially the painting of the same name by Michaelangelo.

http://d-sites.net/english/yeats.htm

Now that i think about it, everyone should read this link.

[chmpman]

Thank you. Very interesting, but I'll have to spend more time, the site holds a lot of text to digest.