The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound by Frances Dickey

Abstract

Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound by Frances Dickey University of Virginia Press, 2012. 260 pages Early on in this accomplished and wide-reaching study, Frances Dickey distinguishes between the late Victorian poetic tropes of persona and portrait. But leave it to Oscar Wilde to muddle such fine distinction. Putting his best lines, as he usually did, in the mouth of one of his characters (personae),Wilde's Basil Hallward (portraitist) declares that: Every portrait that is painted with feeling is portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. (Dorian) Wilde is, of course, playing with the kind of witty reversal that was already in 1890 one of his signatures. But rhetorical or tropical reversals work only when the conventional sense is so well established it doesn't need explaining: the reversal works precisely because it summons rather than banishes truism. By 1890 this expectation that the portrait offers window into the of the sitter was already venerable tradition, one that Dickey traces back to William Cowper's ekphrastic portrait On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture (1798). In other words, Wilde was here reaffirming rather than breaking with tradition. By the time Wilde published Dorian Gray two other conceptions of the portrait were challenging the ethically comforting expectation that its real subject was metaphysical. Dickey traces both through the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His painting Bocca Baciata (1859), she asserts, inaugurated new style of flat, decorative female portraiture challenging the assumption that appearance should or reveal the sitter's soul (12). What's exciting here isn't Rossetti's recognition of artistic limit but Dickey's characterization of that conception as moral and ethical challenge: could or should. In Rossetti's hands, the portrait is a self-sufficient object of beauty, assimilating the of the sitter, to her body and both to the material artwork, emphasizing surface and formal condensation. Soon afterwards, this emphasis on surface found verbal expression in two Rossetti poems, both called The Portrait, one sonnet and the other dramatic monologue. sonnet treats the portrait as self-sufficient object of beauty (12). What happens with the dramatic monologue is more complex--and in her reading of this portrait poem Dickey implicitly suggests an important link between Rossetti's poetry and that of Robert Browning. Rossetti's dramatic monologue responds to painted portrait as an uncanny mirror in which past and present, Beloved and self mingle, undermining the traditional dualism of portraiture. Dickey considers the significance of Rossetti giving two formally distinct poems the same title, and her reasoning demonstrates the clarity of mind that marks this volume: verbal condensation of the sonnet's length restrictions and the Petrarchan conventions of itemization and self-reference push Rossetti's shorter poem toward its thing-like self-absorption. By contrast, the measure of the poet's success in dramatic monologue is to sustain the utterance and make it plausible as speech, rather than keep it within prescribed length. dramatic monologue remains constantly aware of its own status as speech act in social context, constructing self and negotiating with the expectations and beliefs of an imagined auditor. form entails not brevity and closure but messy realism and proliferating points of view. Here then, to put it another way, are the two directions that the modern portrait poem has taken away from the Romantic expectation that great portrait captures the of the sitter. …