Women in poetry and comics: multimodal dialogue between John Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay

Abstract

The comic form of art has witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of readers who have chosen this medium to deepen into meaning-making processes in multimodal texts. But little has been said so far about the adaptation of certain literary genres to the comic form. This is the case of poetry, narrative poetry, in particular illustrated in this study in the celebrated ballad: “La belle dame sans merci” (1819) by John Keats and the modern sonnet: “The singing-woman from the wood’s edge” (1920) by the American feminist poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. In view of two recent adaptations to the comic format of these poems, the present investigation explores from a comparative approach the semiotic processes at stake in representing women from the poets’ own point of view and also from their corresponding graphic artists’ in order to have a look at the changes in the depiction of women in poetry from the Romantic image of women to the view of women in the early twentieth century to the present day.