Keats criticism and class notes Flashcards
What does ekphrasis mean?
From ekphrazein: to speak out, to tell in full; detailed literary description of any object, real or imaginary.
Also has a rhetorical characteristic. Ekphrastic poetry moves with a self-conscious craft, steadily or furtively, between imitation of and resistance to the tactile, sensuous persuasiveness of art objects.
Greek roots ek (out) and phrassein (speak) – literally, to speak out or declare – ekphrasis once meant to tell something fully. Becomes aligned with phantasia and enárgeia, or “vividness,” the capacity to describe something so well that it seems to come alive in the minds of the audience.
How is ekphrasis linked to the “sister arts” of poetry and painting?
There is an ancient and supposedly familial rivalry between the verbal and the visual arts of poetry and painting.
This is traced back to Latin poet Horace’s claim that poetry is a speaking picture and that painting is silent poetry.
Ekphrasis is poetry that describes a painting, or piece of art.
How might ekphrasis be gendered?
The “sister arts” thing might actually be more of a sibling rivalry.
A gendered economy, wherein the poet speaks from the world of masculinity, action, narrative, and insists (/desires) that the work of art is mute, spatial, and female. (W.J.T. Mitchell).
Superiority vibes - uneasy blend of assistance and superiority in the way ekphrasis “gives voice and language to otherwise mute art object” (Jean Hagstrum)
However, if words have an advantage because they can tell a whole story rather than just a single frame, lyric poetry betrays this with its “still moments” (Murray Krueger)
- Keats is full of suspended moments.
What is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s complaint in ‘Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry’ (1766)?
That the sister-arts analogy has in poetry “engendered a mania for description and in painting a mania for allegory, by attempting to make the former a speaking picture, without actually knowing what it could and ought to paint, and the latter a silent poem, without having considered to what degree it is able to express general ideas”
Who wrote ‘Keats and Ekphrasis’?
Theresa M. Kelley
What is at the core of Keats’s poetic ekphrasis?
- Hidden complexity and anxiety.
- Lessing’s idea that poetry and words convey stories while art conveys still moments; at best a “pregnant moment”, as some critics call it - and the moment cannot depict climax of action or suffering because the viewer must imagine rest of narrative.
- Keats’s ekphrastic represen- tation of female figures as objects that inspire desire and dread.
- Keats’s sustained recognitions of history and time passing as he makes the story evoked in the visual works of art tell against the grain of their mute forms.
How else does Keats’s work link to Lessing’s essay?
- His poetry enacts the rivalry with painting (as Lessing urged) by deploying poetic resources against the suasions of the visual, even in the midst of describing them.
- At the same time, however, even at same poetic time, he reveals the desire hidden within Lessing’s argument.
What is the contradiction in Lessing’s essay?
- Lessing complains that poets have become too obsessed with description and painters too obsessed with allegory, so it is no longer meaningful.
- But ‘Lacoon’ is a sculpture, to which Lessing is attracted for its massive, 3D materiality; yet his argument requires it to be flattened so it can illustrate how artwork exists on a single plane. (David Wellbery)
- Flattened works are less likely to be taken for the real thing, or for works whose materiality needs to be denied, in order for verbal art to retain its status as most realistic form.
How is Lessing involved in the core of Keats’s mode of ekphrasis?
His anxiety and complexity over what constitutes a piece of art, whether it is flat, more realistic than poetry etc.
Why is Ode on a Grecian Urn different from the usual ekphrasis?
- The speaker does not exude confidence in their task, which is usually present in the performance of ekphrasis.
- Instead it has a tonal perplexity.
What kind of questions does Keats ask the Urn?
Questions limited to exteriors.
What kind of urn is it?
A funerary one. - The speaker is silent about this.
What happens in stanza four?
The speaker turns away from the depicted scenes to imagine a new one.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
Does the Urn answer Keats’s questions?
No - Although Keats’s poet speaks for fifty lines, he finds few answers to the questions he asks; the urn insists on staying a “silent form” to “tease us out of thought”
What is significant about the Marbles?
They are artworks separated from their original site and structure.
Their transport to London is a tragicomic story of ruin and loss.
They have a cultural history which Keats evokes in his ekphrasis.
Keats uses topographical features to indicate the creative endeavor: the arduous sculpting of the figures on great marble blocks, themselves quarried with difficulty; the “godlike hardship” of the marbles. Cut down and shipped in pieces, their quasi-divine material forms are damaged and broken apart.
