The Modern Portrait Poem

From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound

Frances Dickey

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932699
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Modern Portrait Poem, Frances Dickey recovers the portrait as a poetic genre from the 1860s through the 1920s. Combining literary and art history, she examines the ways Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. Whistler transformed the genre of portraiture in both painting and poetry. She then shows how their new ways of looking at and thinking about the portrait subject migrated across the Atlantic to influence Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, and other poets. These poets creatively exposed the Victorian portrait to new influences ranging from Manet's realism to modern dance, Futurism, and American avant-garde art. They also condensed, expanded, and combined the genre with other literary modes including epitaph, pastoral, and Bildungsroman.

Dickey challenges the tendency to view Modernism as a break with the past and as a transition from aural to visual orientation. She argues that the Victorian poets and painters inspired the new generation of Modernists to test their vision of Aestheticism against their perception of modernity and the relationship between image and text. In bridging historical periods, national boundaries, and disciplinary distinctions, Dickey makes a case for the continuity of this genre over the Victorian/Modernist divide and from Britain to the United States in a time of rapid change in the arts.

PART ONE

The Portrait Poem to 1912

ONE

Portraiture in the Rossetti Circle

WINDOW, OBJECT, OR MIRROR

THE ARTIST ENGAGED on a portrait, is to inscribe the character and not the features,” instructed an 1861 article on portraiture. The artist “must ‘esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.’ ”¹ According to this view of portraiture, the artist’s job is to make the sitter’s hidden interior visible, to interpret the sitter’s soul on the basis of his or her physical appearance. While the ideas about portrait-painting expressed in this article from Bentley’s Miscellany remained more or less consistent in the popular imagination through the nineteenth century, they were already being challenged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a series of new paintings of women begun in 1859. In the decade that followed, Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, and Algernon Swinburne built on each other’s insights as all three sought to decouple the portrait’s significance from the sitter’s interiority.

In this chapter I map out the conventions of the Victorian portrait poem and examine the changes that Rossetti and his circle wrought on this genre. I focus on three models of portraiture found in poetry around 1860–1870: the portrait as window, object, or mirror. William Cowper’s 1798 “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture” was much admired throughout the nineteenth century and set the model for many portrait poems about women. Cowper leads the reader through a series of “faithful” representations, from the expression on the sitter’s face, to her soul, to the God that authorizes both her being and her portrait. The portrait assures the legibility of appearances as a sign of interiority, treating the face as the window to the soul. Consistent with Victorian sentimentalism, this approach remained popular through 1900.

At the same time, however, portrait poems by Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning introduced doubts about the legibility of appearances, challenging the idea that one can see “through” a portrait (or a face) to the subject’s soul. In the 1860s, Rossetti developed a style of female portraiture that extended these challenges by privileging the physical beauty of the sitter and the decorative surface of the painting at the expense of messages about her soul or character. His emphasis on surface marked the modernity of Rossetti’s painting in a way that was immediately recognized by his circle of fellow artists and writers. In this respect Rossetti also anticipated and prepared the way for developments in modern painting that privileged flatness over depth, and design over narrative.

Rossetti composed two portrait poems that offer quite different interpretations of his new style of painting. Both entitled “The Portrait,” one is a sonnet that forms part of the House of Life sequence, and the other is a dramatic monologue. The sonnet considers the status of the portrait as a self-sufficient aesthetic object, showing how the value of the portrait can be seen to reside on the surface of the painting. Image-laden and condensed, the sonnet draws attention to itself and the painting as material objects that require no referent other than themselves. The approach mapped out by this sonnet descends into Modernism via Imagism and “the materialist ‘thing-tradition.’ ”² Modernist portrait poems equating people with things such as Ezra Pound’s “An Object” can be traced back to this materialist interpretation of Rossetti’s surfaces.

Rossetti’s other poem called “The Portrait” explores portraiture as reflection and doubling. Though a mirror is a material object, it reflects the insubstantial image of the space before it. A mirror creates a space that is neither on nor behind its surface, but rather exists in between itself and the objects it reflects. Rossetti shared his lifelong interest in reflections and doubles with both Swinburne and Whistler, who also developed this idea of an in-between space, or “interspace” as Swinburne called it. Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror” of 1865 describes Whistler’s painting The Little White Girl (later titled Symphony in White, No. 2), thinking through the significance of the flattened picture plane in this painting and in Rossetti’s recent portraits. Instead of locating the girl’s meaning on the surface of her body or on the canvas, Swinburne imagines a kind of interiority that exists in between reflecting surfaces, such as between the girl and her image in the mirror (in Whistler’s painting) and between the viewer and the girl in the picture (in the poem itself). Interiority is shifted from the individual subject to the relation between herself and objects in the painting, her reflection, and ourselves. The differing modes of portraiture received from Rossetti and his circle—condensed and material vs. expansive and interspatial—underwrite the genre as it developed in the Modernist era.

Window: Cowper’s Legacy

Reflecting mainstream views about portraiture, the author of the Bentley’s Miscellany article quoted above affirms the portraitist’s role as an interpreter of the soul. The painter discovers “the permanent, the essential, the ideal,” in the subject; he chooses the “noblest moment of the sitter, when the ‘God within him lights his face.’ ”³ The most famous exposition of the relationship between portraiture and the sitter’s eternal soul is, as the author explains, William Cowper’s “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture out of Norfolk, the Gift of My Cousin Ann Bodham”: “of all benedictions . . . with which English poetry has hailed the portrait-painter, there is none, probably, that speaks so home to the common heart, as that by Cowper, in the familiar instance (familiar in all our mouths as household words—for a household word it is, in itself) of his Mother’s Picture.”⁴ The language of “home,” “heart,” and “household” emphasizes the poem’s status as an anchor both of its genre and the traditional values it articulates. Probably the best-known portrait poem of the first half of the nineteenth century, Cowper’s “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture” also extended its influence well into the second half.⁵ This poem was identified as the “best poem for class study” of Cowper in an 1878 literature textbook.⁶ Another critic declared in 1880, “There is nothing more pathetic yet more simple in English poetry than [Cowper’s] lines on his mother’s picture.”⁷ This famous poem exemplifies a popular strain of nineteenth-century poetic portraiture whose purpose was to affirm the intelligibility of the sitter’s expression and guide its audience through the sitter to a transcendental source variously identified as God or the soul.

Cowper’s poem is occasioned by seeing his mother’s portrait, leading the poet to recall her and tell the story of her death when he was only six years old. As is conventional in nineteenth-century ekphrastic portraits, the poem begins by describing the subject’s appearance in the painting and associating her character with her facial features:

Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smile I see,

The same that oft in childhood solaced me . . .

The meek intelligence of those dear eyes

. . . here shines on me still the same.⁸

His mother’s “power to soothe” is her chief character trait in the poem. In the same opening lines, the poet credits the portrait with “baffl[ing] Time’s tyrannic claim,” in immortalizing her through her image. The portrait is an agent of connection, linking her appearance to her character, and the son to his deceased mother.

The meaning and efficacy of the portrait is guaranteed by a strong chain of fidelities reaching from the poet, through the painting, to his mother, and on up through her to God. Cowper addresses the picture as “Faithful remembrancer of one so dear.” This term “faithful” comes to cover every relationship invoked in the poem: the accuracy of the painting to the sitter, the quality of his mother’s affection toward him (“Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall”), his memory of her (“All this still legible in memory’s page, / And still to be so to my latest age”), the sincerity of his tribute to her (“Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere”), and the quality of her own religious faith. Grounded in filial love and religious belief, the poet’s faith also operates to guarantee his account of his mother’s character, as interpreted and elaborated from the painting. Cowper in turn attributes his faithfulness to hers. He ends by asserting that her love remains faithful to him even long after death: “Time has but half succeeded in his theft,— / Thyself remov’d, thy power to soothe me left.”⁹ Cowper thus positions her as the origin of both portraits, the painted and the ekphrastic, and of the fidelity that guarantees their legibility and meaning.

Cowper’s mother in a sense presides over other nineteenth-century portrait poems. Cowper’s filial relationship with the subject of the portrait not only justifies his assertions about her character, it also authorizes his poem and the very genre to which it belongs. The figure of the mother permits the poet to step over the evidential gap between appearances and interiority—indeed, to deny any evidential gap whatsoever. Cowper’s confidence in the fidelity of exterior appearances to interior states makes his poem a touchstone for the author of the Bentley’s essay on portraiture. For many Victorian readers in 1861, this poem written at the outset of the social, economic, and intellectual upheavals of the nineteenth century must have had the reassuring air of an elderly mother, still capable of affirming values and beliefs that had been undermined by science and the fraying of traditional communal ties.

“On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture” also exemplifies the typical gendering of such poems: Cowper’s subject is female, as it is in the majority of nineteenth-century ekphrastic portraits. Male portraits do exist, but they are less common, and follow different conventions. In the male portrait, the subject is typically identified by name and is more likely to be a historical figure than a family member. Thus the standards for knowledge about him are different from those governing female portraits: evidence for his character is drawn from his public deeds and fame, rather than from interpretation of his face and figure. While dramatizing the double standards governing social value for men and women in the nineteenth century, this difference also perhaps explains why the female portrait might have been a more interesting genre for poetic experimentation: it engages with fundamental philosophical and religious questions about what a person is and how we know each other. Looking ahead, one of the contributions of the twentieth-century portrait poem is to transfer the conventions and questions associated with female portraiture to male subjects.

Cowper’s legacy was a tradition of portrait poems emphasizing the transparency of the sitter. The Quaker poet Bernard Barton (1784–1849) wrote a large number of such poems, including “Emma: Verses Suggested by a Portrait” (1845), in which he ascribes “maidenly” qualities to his sitter on the basis of her facial features:

Eyes of mild and thoughtful tone,
Forehead—where no care is shown,
Cheeks just tinted from the rose,
Lips where lurking smiles repose!¹⁰

Each feature of the girl’s appearance is linked to a standard character trait that such a person might be expected to have. He hastens to assure us that she not only looks this way, but everyone who knows her swears it’s so: “Fancy deems the likeness true, / Those who know thee vouch it, too.” Barton specifically links Emma’s “simple loveliness” with her “guileless heart,” combining outside with inside in a single quality: “innocence.”¹¹ Innocence is an ideal trait for the portrait subject; by contrast, a guileful person creates a gap between his true feelings and a deceitful appearance. Thus Barton calls his portrayal of Emma a “blissful task” because he can easily describe her character and “soul” in terms of her looks. Like Cowper’s mother, Emma exhibits a seamless continuity between inside and outside.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1844 “A Portrait” begins, “I will paint her as I see her.” The poet describes the subject’s face as “lily-clear,” an expression that implies both white skin and a clear conscience. As in Barton’s poems, the forehead and eyes tend to be the focal point of the connection between interior and exterior: “a forehead fair and saintly, / Which two blue eyes undershine, / Like meek prayers before a shrine.”¹² Similarly, Frederick Locker-Lampson’s 1857 “On ‘A Portrait of a Lady’ By the Painter” begins,

She is good, for she must have a guileless mind
With that noble, trusting air. . . .

She is lovely and good; she has frank blue eyes . . .

With her wistful mouth, and her candid brow.¹³

Each of the sitter’s features—posture, brow, eyes—is described as the outward expression of an inner trait. The same trope is repeated in John Stuart Blackie’s 1886 “Portrait of a Lady”: “every feature tells / A treasured sweetness in the soul within, / That beats like music through the lucid skin.”¹⁴ As in Cowper’s “On the Receipt of My Mother’s Picture,” the chief virtue of Blackie’s subject is her fidelity: “Her skill is to be true and natural . . . / She knows no falseness . . . truth flows from her deep blue eye.”¹⁵ Her fidelity grounds the correspondence between interior and exterior, just as Barton emphasizes Emma’s innocence for the same reason. This convention may be found as late as Francis Palgrave’s 1892 “Portr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One The Portrait Poem to 1912
• Part Two Modulations 1912 to 1922
• Coda: Rossetti and E. E. Cummings
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index