Beyond the frame

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 formationsfrom archival documents that attest to modernist poets lived experiences in museums and galleries to Pierre Bourdieus sociology of art and critical scholarship in the field of Museum StudiesI 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 museums cultural capital and its then common marginalization of the art and experiences of female subjects, queer subjects, and subjects of color.