Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts

May, William (2011) Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Notes and Queries, 58 (3), 422-424. (doi:10.1093/notesj/gjr084).

Record type: Article

Abstract

MANY critical studies have used the emergence of film and photography to argue for a renewed emphasis on visual culture in the twentieth century; Loizeaux’s work brings this to bear on what might be seen as the archetypal form of the period, the ekphrastic poem, offering suggestive and spry readings on a series of (mainly American) twentieth-century poets. Although her six discrete chapters are neither historically chronological nor linked by an over-arching thesis, the effect is cumulative and illuminating. Each chapter is motivated by a distinct question and coupling of poets, but Loizeaux allows these interrogatives to resurface later in the book, so that Ted Hughes’ ekphrastic work is framed by the same concerns with gender as Marianne Moore’s. Loizeaux’s introduction outlines her interest in the social context and material production of the ekphrastic genre, and offers a useful delineation of the various types of ekphrastic poem, from those addressing the painting as a historical object, as in Robert Lowell’s sonnet ‘Sir Thomas More’, to those seeing the artwork as a tutelary deity, as in Sylvia Plath’s tributes to Paul Klee.

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