Why They Are Not Painters: Ekphrasis and Art Criticism in the Twentieth Century

This study of twentieth-century poetry proposes a re-examination of how we interpret ekphrasis, or poems that address existing works of visual art, by tracing a historical trajectory of these poems as responses to the art and critical climate of their time. Though much scholarship has elaborated the stakes of ekphrasis as a confrontation between the "sister arts," between narrative time and visual stasis, and between desiring self and its enigmatic other, many modern iterations of the genre suggest its hybridity as a work of art and of criticism that poets use to consider the value and function of images in their world. The representative poets in this study - Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara - were not only adapting strategies gleaned from their encounters with Cubist, Surrealist, Dadaist, Abstract Expressionist, Neo-Dadaist, and Pop art and artists, but were also actively involved in critical debates about how this art was being interpreted, at times in their prose essays, but more frequently in their ekphrastic poems. These poets were especially interested in, and often suspicious of, the critical trend of formalism, which became increasingly orthodox in its interpretation of modern art in the postwar period. The intervention of this study is to demonstrate how these ekphrastic poems function as an alternative discourse to formalism, challenging not only the orthodoxy of its increasingly rigid tenets, but also its underlying preoccupation with values of order, purity and unity. These poetic appraisals of art exploit the resources of their medium, such as Moore's literary and archeological allusions to jars, which critique Roger Fry's separation of form from function, Auden's parody of the art critic that suggests the dangerous allure of art divorced from political life, Williams' resistance to interpretation through pastiche and O'Hara's blending of ekphrasis and elegy to expose the emotional repression inherent in Clement Greenberg's authoritarian rhetoric. These poets suggest that writing about visual art often reveals as much about the observer as it does about the art, and thus they turn to ekphrasis for its potential to multiply the lenses through which to do that seeing.

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