Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery

by James A.W. Heffernan

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures.

In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Art, Literary Criticism

257 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Dr. James Heffernan is Emeritus Professor of English at Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH).

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whew! What a slog. I originally tracked this book down because I had a yen to read about ekphrastic poetry. Unfortunately, I forgot that when I have a yen to read academic writing about poetry, it usually means that I want to read about the craft of writing poetry and not so much the literary criticism end of it. This book was slow-going, mostly because my lit-crit brain is WAY out of practice. Mr. Heffernan's thesis is wholly reasonable: that ekphrasis necessarily involves a struggle for power between image and language. The thesis is so reasonable, in fact, that some of the arguments made to prove it seem forced, narrow, arcane, and a little excessive. But I guess I feel that way about most academic writing. I kept thinking, "Okay, okay! I get it! I'm on your side, here, buddy. Relax, geez!"

The later chapters, with their focus on Romantic, Modern, & Post-Modern poems, were the most interesting to me. I love Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts", and Heffernan's treatment of Williams' Breughel poems and Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" were just fine. I'd never thought about them in terms of a power struggle between the image and the written word before, and it was enjoyable and enlightening to do so here. However, I don't think that this is the only lens through which we should read these, or any other, ekphrastic poems. Ultimately, this book just left me wanting to just go back to the poems themselves and read them for an unfiltered experience of the craft. Which isn't a bad thing.

[Eleni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Organized under four headings - early ekphrastic pieces by Homer, Virgil, and Dante; treatment of rape from Ovid to Shakespeare (including Chaucer and Spenser); Romantic ekphrasis (including Wordswoth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron; and Modern and Postmodern ekphrasis (mainly Browning, Auden, Williams, and Ashbery), this is an in depth look at select pieces, eras, and themes.