For thousands of years, in what we call, rather quaintly, the Western world, people have been writing poems prompted by paintings or sculpture, and it would be strange if this were not so. After all, different though the art forms may be, they all trade in transformation—in the seizing of something that the artists know to be in large degree unseizable, and in its rendering in a medium which keeps a kind of faith with the original, but which constantly acknowledges that the thing seen or said has gone to an utterly different country. Painter or sculptor on the one hand, and poet on the other—they are at one in their launching magic carpets which, bedraggled or seamless, take the observer somewhere else. Art which declines to do this has simply lost its nerve; and when a poet decides to write in response to a visible work of art, he or she is acknowledging that the nerve has been kept, and shown.
The technical word for writing, especially poetry, that ‘renders’ a work of art is ‘ekphrasis’, which means literally a ‘speaking forth’ of the thing seen. When Homer, in the Iliad, described the shield of Achilles, or Keats collated various Grecian urns to give us a poem, or Emma Lazarus wrote her famous lines about the huddled masses and put them in the mouth of the Statue of Liberty, or Auden produced the death of Icarus from this picture and that, they were all in the ekphrastic line of business whether or not they knew it, or cared. And certainly for the last three at least a swarm of companions might be named. What John Hollander has called ‘Poems speaking to silent works of art’ must exist in their thousands, if not in their tens of thousands.
Hollander’s expression is a good one, in that the ‘speaking to’ may imply a range of ways in which poems address the artworks seen. The transaction may be intimate, and perhaps affable, so that the element of homage is prominent, and in some cases all-important—as Keats, for example, gives his imagined urn the reverence which in other circumstances he might have given to the God in whom he did not in fact believe. But the ‘speaking to’ may also have all of the latitude implied when a parliamentarian ‘speaks to’ a motion: on the floor of the House, what is offered is supposed both