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Modernist Ekphrasis and Museum Politics

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Modernist Ekphrasis and Museum Politics 1 BEYOND THE FRAME: MODERNIST EKPHRASIS AND MUSEUM POLITICS A dissertation presented By Frank Robert Capogna to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2017 2 BEYOND THE FRAME: MODERNIST EKPHRASIS AND MUSEUM POLITICS A dissertation presented By Frank Robert Capogna ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April 2017 3 ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that the public art museum and its practices of collecting, organizing, and defining cultures at once enabled and constrained the poetic forms and subjects available to American and British poets of a transatlantic long modernist period. I trace these lines of influence particularly as they shape modernist engagements with ekphrasis, the historical genre of poetry that describes, contemplates, or interrogates a visual art object. Drawing on a range of materials and theoretical formations—from archival documents that attest to modernist poets’ lived experiences in museums and galleries to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art and critical scholarship in the field of Museum Studies—I situate modernist ekphrastic poetry in relation to developments in twentieth-century museology and to the revolutionary literary and visual aesthetics of early twentieth-century modernism. This juxtaposition reveals how modern poets revised the conventions of, and recalibrated the expectations for, ekphrastic poetry to evaluate the museum’s cultural capital and its then common marginalization of the art and experiences of female subjects, queer subjects, and subjects of color. Analyzing the ekphrastic poetry of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, Marianne Moore, Siegfried Sassoon, H. D., and Melvin Tolson, “Beyond the Frame” asserts that these poets radically reconstitute the poetics of ekphrasis by locating their poetic speakers within museums and attending to their critical acts of looking at art on display. In the process, their ekphrastic poems convey aesthetic meanings— anti-heteronormative, anti-colonial, and anti- racist—that undermine the museum’s exclusionary framings of cultural history. Contributing to recent conversations in the New Modernist Studies on the public institutions that shaped the development of modernism, and in Historical Poetics on the synchronic and culturally contingent nature of poetic genres, I show modernist ekphrasis to be representative of the ways in which the 4 modernist literary field was constituted in unsettled relation to the forms of institutional authority and cultural capital against which it is often defined. “Beyond the Frame” thus offers a new perspective on the intersections among poetic discourse, visual culture, and cultural institutions in modernist poetry, and a context for historicizing turn-of-the-century public art museums through poems written in and about objects in their collections. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is a monument to the care, energy, and support invested in it by so many individuals whom I can only begin to thank. I am particularly grateful to my dissertation co- chairs, whose wisdom and shaping hands have been essential to its making. Thank you to Guy Rotella for your steadfast guidance and zeal for pushing me to always read closer and deeper, the results of which are evident on every page. Thank you to Mary Loeffelholz, for your generosity in offering to co-chair my committee at a late stage in the dissertation project, and for your enthusiastic and discerning feedback that has formatively shaped my writing and thinking. Special gratitude is due to Laura Green, who has acted as a formal and informal advisor throughout my graduate studies: thank you for being a believer in me, for your patience in orienting me through academic life, and for always having an open door and an open ear. Thank you to Carrie Preston, for joining this project as an outside reader with blind faith in my ability to carry it out, and for your always perceptive insights. Although not an official member of my committee, Theo Davis has been a consistent champion of my work, and I thank her for the encouragement she has offered me throughout my graduate studies. Thanks are owed, too, to Northeastern’s Humanities Center, and particularly its tireless director, Lori Lefkovitz; the 2016-17 session’s convener, Alisa Lincoln; and the fellows of the “Inclusions and Exclusions” seminar. The resources, feedback, and brilliant conversations provided by a Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities Center during my final year at Northeastern have been vital for finishing the dissertation. It has been a rare pleasure to spend the last six years among the graduate student community in the English Department. Although there are too many to name here, I would like to acknowledge Paul Babin, Erin Frymire, Lauren Kuryloski, Charlie Lesh, Chris Myers, Lauren 6 Thacker, and Michael Turner. The feedback provided by members of Professor Green’s dissertation writer’s group, past and present, have greatly benefitted my project. I am so very grateful as well for the administrative staff of the English Department, and particularly Melissa Daigle and Linda Collins. Thank you to the special collections librarians of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Rosenbach Library (especially Elizabeth Fuller), the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the Berg Collection of British and American Literature at the New York Public Library, for their assistance as I learned (and routinely relearned) what precisely it is that one does in an archive. I would never have made it into graduate school, not to mention to the final throes of dissertation writing, without the encouragement of the English Department and the Honors College at Adelphi University, and I extend special expressions of gratitude to Greg Mercurio, Lahney Preston-Matto, and Louise Geddes for their continued generosity, kindness, and mentorship. Friends back home in New York have been vital reminders of the joys that still remain outside of libraries: thank you to Dan Weprin, for day games at Yankee Stadium and far too many evenings at Sleep No More; to Chris Smith, for always needed levity, for regular (and sometimes willing) accompaniment to museums, and especially for the introduction to Rudy’s; and to Donald McCarthy, if I must. Thank you to my family—to my mother, Debra, and to my aunts (and second mothers), JoAnn and Sue—for your unwavering love and unqualified support for me in my every endeavor. Finally, this dissertation would not have been possible without Sarah Leventer, whose love and affection, care and collaboration, have sustained both it and me; in the pages that follow, hers is “the breath drawn after every line.” 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 5 Table of Contents 7 List of Figures 8 Introduction 9 Chapter One: Site, Sight and Song: Placing “Michael Field” 42 Chapter Two: “Something that Makes Me Feel at Home”: Moore’s Ekphrastic Galleries 103 Chapter Three: Museum Politics: Sassoon’s Satirical Poems 159 Chapter Four: The Muse in the Museum: H. D.’s Relational Ekphrasis 207 Chapter Five: Black Aesthetics in the Public Art Museum: Tolson’s Art World Ekphrasis 261 Works Cited 320 8 LIST OF FIGURES 1.1. Pietro Perugino, “Apollo and Marsyas,” c. 1495 66 1.2. A page from Michael Field, Sight and Song, 1892 74 1.3. Bartolomeo Veneto, Idealized Portrait of a Courtesan as Flora, c. 1480-1519 86 1.4. Giorgione, The Sleeping Venus, c. 1510 93 4.1. H. D., outgoing letter to Viola Baxter Jordan (Viola Baxter Jordan Papers, 254 Beinecke Library, Yale University) 5.1. Francisco Goya, The Second of May 1808, 1814 289 5.2. Paolo Veronese, or the Workshop of Veronese, The Daughters of Lot Flee from 294 Sodom, c. 1585 5.3. Tintoretto, Paradise, 1592 295 9 Introduction “Beyond the Frame: Modernist Ekphrasis and Museum Politics” is an inquiry into how six Anglophone modernist poets—working in disparate locales, at disparate times, and with disparate poetic commitments—responded to the public art museum and its practices of collecting, organizing, and displaying cultures, and did so through formal innovations in ekphrasis, the poetic description of a visual art object. Scholars and writers of poetry today typically trace the genealogy of ekphrasis as a branch of lyric poetry: the contemplation of an art object uttered by an undifferentiated, universalized lyric “I” who probes the representational differences between the arts of painting and poetry. In this formulation, the ekphrastic poem occurs within a spaceless and timeless aesthetic realm, turning inward to reflect on the particular stylistic resources of its own medium through comparison to the visual other. “Beyond the Frame” troubles the primacy and singularity of this lyric paradigm in poetic criticism by turning to the work of modern poets who take the conventions of ekphrasis in a different direction. That is, they bring this poetic mode into art museums, in order to attend to their poetic speakers’ local and critical acts of looking at works of art as they are put on exhibition in these spaces. In doing so, these poets reframe ekphrasis into a situation for interrogating then commonly marginalized issues of racial, class, and sexual difference in museum collections. For these diverse poets— from canonical modernists Marianne Moore and H. D.,
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