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Explores Eliot’s many-sided engagements with painting, sculpture, architecture, music, drama, music hall and cinema, recorded sound, and dance, drawing on newly available sources, archival material, and interart connections.

This volume explores Eliot's many-sided engagements with painting, sculpture, architecture, music, drama, music hall and cinema, recorded sound and dance, drawing on newly available sources, archival material, and interart connections.

InThe Modern Portrait Poem,Frances Dickey recovers the portrait as a poetic genre from the 1860s through the 1920s. Combining literary and art history, she examines the ways Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. Whistler transformed the genre of portraiture in both painting and poetry. She then shows how their new ways of looking at and thinking about the portrait subject migrated across the Atlantic to influence Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, and other poets. These poets creatively exposed the Victorian portrait to new influences ranging from Manet's realism to modern dance, Futurism, and American avant-garde art. They also condensed, expanded, and combined the genre with other literary modes including epitaph, pastoral, and Bildungsroman. Dickey challenges the tendency to view Modernism as a break with the past and as a transition from aural to visual orientation. She argues that the Victorian poets and painters inspired the new generation of Modernists to test their vision of Aestheticism against their perception of modernity and the relationship between image and text. In bridging historical periods, national boundaries, and disciplinary distinctions, Dickey makes a case for the continuity of this genre over the Victorian/Modernist divide and from Britain to the United States in a time of rapid change in the arts.

From the start of Eliot’s poetic career—to be precise, in 1909, when he began inscribing poems in the notebook he provisionally calledInventions of the March Hare—his poetry engaged a world of musical forms, sounds, and discourse. The notebook’s table of contents indicates the breadth and intensity of his musical experimentation: his titles include three caprices, four preludes, two interludes, two love songs, an opera, a rhapsody, airs, and a suite. In addition to drawing analogies between poems and musical genres, Eliot alludes to specific works of music, such as Chopin’sPreludes, Wagner’sTristan und IsoldeandGötterdämmerung,

In 1914, william carlos williams sent a sequence of “Pastorals and Self-Portraits” to his friend Viola Baxter. Like Eliot’s “On a Portrait” and Pound’s “La Donzella Beata” and “Portrait: from ‘La Mère Inconnue,’” these poems were the first in a series of portraits that Williams would write in the nineteen-teens, before moving on to more expansive forms in the 1920s. The group of eight poems included two “Self-Portraits,” two “Pastorals,” and two “Idyls.” As these titles suggest, Williams saw an affinity between pastoral and portraiture in the sense that the natural world, specifically landscape, was his subject in both genres.

The artist england on a portrait, is to inscribe the character and not the features,” instructed an 1861 article on portraiture. The artist “must ‘esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.’”¹ According to this view of portraiture, the artist’s job is to make the sitter’s hidden interior visible, to interpret the sitter’s soul on the basis of his or her physical appearance. While the ideas about portrait-painting expressed in this article fromBentley’s Miscellanyremained more or less consistent in the popular imagination through the nineteenth century,