This chapter qualifies Randall Jarrell’s assertion that all of Bishop’s poems have ‘written underneath it, I have seen it’ by examining those similes which simultaneously enable and defy visualisation. Drawing especially on Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis, it examines similes in Bishop’s ekphrastic poems that are at once moving and still. This chapter also considers her use of self-reflexive, paradoxical similes, which are often used in metaphysical poems, and goes on to demonstrate how Bishop’s use of this simile would influence subsequent American and Northern Irish poets. Also considered are: the effects of psychologising similes in her dramatic monologues; Homeric similes in her poems of war and violence; and her use of what C. S. Lewis, in an essay on Dante, described as similes that work by dint of their ‘unlikeness’. Criticism of simile often stresses the likeness made between tenor and vehicle; here, the view is proposed that, conversely, many of Bishop’s similes rely on a marked unlikeness for their effects.

This chapter examines one of the most distinctive features of Bishop’s work: her frequent use of correctio. When using this rhetorical scheme, writers will correct, question, rephrase or offer alternatives to their words and phrases in the body of the text itself (rather than, say, in the process of redrafting). The first part of this chapter gives an account of: correctio’s history; its characterisation in early-modern and twentieth-century rhetorical manuals; its risks and rewards; and its indiscriminate approval by Bishop’s critics. The chapter then analyses its frequent use by three major influences on Bishop: George Herbert, William Wordsworth and Marianne Moore. The main part of this chapter then examines Bishop’s use of correctio in relation to visual art, nature writing, memory, the representation of consciousness, scepticism, and elegy.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, artists of color began to gain prominence and squarely address the burden of recognition and the politics of representation over race and Britishness. Chapter 3 focuses on Maud Sulter and David Dabydeen, who highlight the Black presence in European and British art through the poetic genre of ekphrasis, or poems on visual art. In Sulter’s case, the Scottish Ghanaian lesbian artist conducts a series of “queer reframings” through her career-long preoccupation with Jeanne Duval, the common-law wife, “Black Venus,” and muse to Charles Baudelaire. In contrast, David Dabydeen takes on one of the most revered English artists in his long poem, Turner (Peepal Tree, 1995), which enters into conversation with Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On, commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840). Their ekphrastic experimentations pattern forms of Blackness and racialized being whose radical alterity become “beyond recognition,” to the point of becoming nearly inscrutable and unknown in aesthetic form.

This chapter focuses on how Pater looked at the natural world and art. It discusses how he practiced and thought about the very act of looking. For him, this was both an acutely personal act, and something demanding recognition that the object being looked at has its own specificity – material, historical, and contextual. This chapter asks what qualities he retained as visual touchstones across the broad historical timespan, from the Greeks to the present day, that he addressed; and through the variety of different modes in which he captured the objects of sight – essays, reviews, fiction, and imaginary ‘portraits’ of figures from the past. It shows that all are unified by Pater’s habits of looking, including how he saw colour, and by the process of translation into verbal language, with attention to works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’ and Marius the Epicurean.

Chapter 3 explores A. C. Swinburne’s intermedial engagement with Milton. In Swinburne’s republican poetry, Milton emerges as a significant figure associated with virtue and freedom; both poets link questions of liberty to bodily violence. The chapter discusses Milton’s Areopagitica, the divorce tracts and the Piedmont sonnet alongside Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, before turning to Paradise Lost. The chapter draws on queer readings of Milton’s epic to argue that Milton’s erotic, androgynous universe informs Swinburne’s anti-theistic poetic project, particularly in its treatment of bodily indeterminacy and the figure of the hermaphrodite. Swinburne’s reading of Milton is considered alongside his reading of Sappho and Charles Baudelaire, as well as William Blake: Swinburne alludes to erotic moments in Paradise Lost at the same time as he transforms William Blake’s illustrations of the poem, in an act of commingling presented as an example of Swinburne’s ‘intermedial ekphrasis’.

Chapter 5 turns to intermedial comparison between word and image, taking the image-text as an example to examine how ludic strategies of representation create intermedial experiences of risk. In the chapter I compare Xi Xi with contemporary French poet Michèle Métail. Both poets have created a substantial number of image-texts. I first examine how they employ ekphrasis – the verbal representation of images – to explore the tension and complementarity between language and visual media and emphasize the risks of aesthetic experimentation and mediated perception. I then discuss their use of the parergon, understood as the concrete borders of an artwork (the ergon) and, figuratively, as a cognitive framing and recontextualization of literature that questions what the literary work is. Gregory Bateson argued that play is a ‘cognitive frame’ (1972). In this chapter, I argue that the parergon is a ludic method that suggests the transgression of frames and puts the artwork (ergon) at risk. Image-texts show how risk is shaped by medium-specificity and technologies of mediation.

This Introduction offers a historical survey of the relationship between impressionism and literature, especially poetry. The chapter foregrounds the stylistic variety of the visual form – what Renoir called its ‘irregularité’ – as well as its wide range of cultural connotations during the period. It then explores how this irregularity was replicated in literary responses to impressionist art. Tracing the word’s passage out of the Paris salons, into contemporary French writing and across the Channel, it charts how various important ideas in the history of modern poetry – ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism – were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that ’impressionism’ was one of the crucial terms – often the crucial term – through and against which verse of the period was defined. The Introduction concludes by discussing the drawbacks of recent attempts to propose unified theories of ‘literary impressionism’, and suggests that the relationship between impressionism and literature might more fruitfully be conceived as one of irreconcilable irregularity, particularity and self-difference.

Chapter 1 explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and the definitions of literary impressionism put forward in his important essay on French writing, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). The chapter begins by discussing the language of sanity and wholeness (or their absence) in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its emphasis on formal fragmentation and strenuously subjective effects. It suggests that this theory furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which, in turn, provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary seemed to disintegrate under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The chapter concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

Chapter 6 digs deeper into the textual conventions deployed in many of the monumental inscriptions set up on restored structures. In particular, it points to how they responded to and influenced the experience of the inexorable degradation of time through a rhetoric of ruin and fragmentation that both naturalized and justified the form or extent of rebuilding and in late antiquity shifted to increasingly vivid, sensorially affective forms.

This chapter explores how the revision of amatory poetics creates a throughline across all seven volumes of poems jointly written by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper under the pen name of Michael Field. This chapter argues that Michael Field’s revision of the tradition of love poetry, and specifically the Renaissance tradition of courtly love poetry, opens a space for same-sex eroticism, feminist revision of male-centric tropes and the male gaze, and even calls into question the lyric voice as a construct. Bradley and Cooper’s poems complicate the lover/beloved binary through voice and poetic form, shaping the love lyric into a more apt vehicle for their own unique voice and position.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic poems, Sight and Song, in the context of fin-de-siècle art criticism. It explains ekphrasis as a genre and that genre’s relationship with art criticism, as well as Michael Field’s relationship with both. Sight and Song claims to set down on paper the ‘poetry’ that is ‘incarnate[d]’ within their paintings of study. Michael Field try to use the volume to assert their authority as both poets and art critics, instructing their readers about their paintings of study and about how one ought to appreciate all paintings. This chapter explores how successful this project was and how it was informed by Michael Field’s own personal experiences within the predominantly masculine aesthetic and art critical communities.

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper caught the new enthusiasm for Renaissance Italy among writers, artists, critics, and historians that was so prominent a feature of British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly influential was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which celebrates the multiple temporalities of the Renaissance, its reconciliation of pagan and Christian, and its capacious embrace of the ancient past and a dynamically conceived modernity. Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic lyrics Sight and Song (1892) is dominated by the Renaissance art that inspired the art and writing of many in the poets’ circle, including Pater himself, Ruskin, Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, the Berensons, Vernon Lee, Ricketts, Shannon, Beardsley, and Wilde. This chapter argues that it was these artists and writers, all drawn to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, who collectively established the most significant context for Michael Field’s creative engagement with the Renaissance.

This chapter frames Thomas Mann’s engagement with physiognomic culture in his 1912 novella. The aesthetics of the face staged by Mann’s novella conjure a physiognomic hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy, one finds the character of Tadzio portrayed as a neoclassical Greek sculpture. The mechanism for this projection is ekphrasis. At the bottom of the hierarchy, Mann’s novella constructs a series of racialized minor characters identified as facial types. The text nonetheless destabilizes this hierarchy through the figure of the barber, who gives Aschenbach a consequential makeover – a version of Loy’s “auto-facial-construction,” in this case relying on makeup. The chapter places the discussion of Tadzio’s “perfect face” in relation to the recent reassessment of Luchino Visconti’s cinematic adaptation of Mann’s novella in Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri’s documentary, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021). The conclusion: the veneration of youthful face comes at a cost.

Percy Shelley’s interest in the visual arts (painting and sculpture, but also monuments and landscapes) was much heightened by the years spent in Italy, where in letters and notebooks, he records a wide range of encounters and sharpened his powers of observation, perception, and description. This chapter presents several important contexts and instances, from accounts in his letters to Thomas Love Peacock of the paintings in Bologna that particularly moved him (such as Raphael’s St. Cecilia), to his ekphrastic verses on a painting of the head of Medusa, to his wide-ranging descriptive notes on sculptures in Rome and in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These are situated historically in terms of increased access to, and engagement with, the visual arts in the period, and as important sites for Shelley to work through the imaginative transmutation of the visual into the visionary in his own poetry and poetic theory.

Lucian is a master of ekphrasis – the art of rhetorical description and notably the vivid verbal evocation of works of art. One particular aspect of Lucian’s art historical enterprise is a comparative aesthetic. This extends beyond the comparison of artworks with other things or people (in texts whose titles signal such comparison) to some of the forms in which Lucian chose to write, notably dialogic media (whether dramatic of reported). This comparative game knowingly plays with the inevitable competition of art and text that inheres in the verbal description of the visual. Beyond this, Lucian takes synkrisis or comparison – a central trope in the rhetorical handbooks – and exploits it so as to give voice to the marginal, to elevate the alien and to emphasise questions of multiplicity and diversity within empire. This ideological exploitation of description is what in part has made Lucian so attractive and controversial since the era of Renaissance Humanism. The apparently unproblematic arena of visual aesthetics is brilliantly seized – not only by Lucian but also many of his modern readers – as a site within which to reveal the place, voice, and importance of cultural, ethnic and subaltern identities not always in simple harmony with the hegemonic status quo of the Roman empire.