The Recovery of Still Life: On a Gesture in Paul Fry’s Poetic Criticism

Abstract

Reading Paul Fry and reading with Paul Fry involves responding to an invitation to see and to think about seeing. Proceeding from Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008), this essay follows Fry as docent who guides the reader through a gallery of passages in Wordsworth to perceive the layeredness of visual genres informing Wordsworth’s compositions. In his engagement with Wordsworth’s pictorial imaginary and compositional logic, Fry strikingly repeats a gesture of critical ekphrasis that may be termed the “recovery of still life.” He brings to light arrangements of things human and inhuman and shows how they serve both to condition and uncondition the representational claims of history, landscape, and genre painting. While focusing on Fry’s Wordsworth criticism, I situate the recovery of still life within the wider context of his development of a poetics of ostension in A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (1995) and other essays on Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and poetics. I aim to spell out how Fry’s recovery of still life is a distinctive part of his phenomenological approach to poetry and signature aspect of his gift of gentle illumination.