Yeats & The Visual Arts - Hardcover

Loizeaux, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813511755 ISBN 13: 9780813511757

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1987

This volume traces Yeats fascination with the visual arts and their influence on his poetry. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux demonstrates how the influences in Yeats' early years, especially his interest in Pre-Raphaelite painting, helped shape his aesthetic theory and practice as a poet. She argues that the analogies Yeats often used between the visual arts and literature provide an apt way to characterize his own work. In the early verse, the governing analogy is poem-as-painting; later, influenced by his work inthe theatre, Yeats writes poems analogous to the three-dimensional forms of sculpture. Loizeaux's thorough documentation and scholarly approach make her book a useful contribution to our understanding of Yeats' poetry.

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About the Author:

I teach and write about 20th century poetry. Pursuing a particular interest in the relations between literature and the visual arts, I have been most concerned with how individual poets have used the visual arts to expand the expressive capacities of language and to address questions of form and content that have compelled them individually and collectively. I began my scholarly work with a focus on the early part of the 20th century. Yeats and the Visual Arts (Rutgers 1986; reissued Syracuse 2003), follows the varied engagements with the visual arts across the career of a single author. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (Cambridge 2008) explores the prevalence of ekphrasis—the poetic representation of a work of art—across the 20th-century among poets in England, Ireland and the US. I’ve been interested particularly in how ekphrasis opens the lyric into a social space, making it interactive, polyvocal and often public. My research and teaching interests also extend into textual studies, especially the semantics of the physical page and the uses of illustration. Before coming to BU in 2012, I taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, where my more than 25 years of classroom experience included overseas teaching in England, Ireland and Germany. I am currently detailed full-time to the provost’s office where I serve as the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs. Although I am not currently teaching, I am glad to talk with students interested in 20th-century poetry and to work with students pursing independent projects at the graduate or undergraduate level.

Review:

Loizeaux ably demonstrates how influences in Yeats's early years, especially his interest in Pre-Raphaelite painting, helped shape his aesthetic theory and practice as a poet. She argues that the analogies Yeats often used between the visual arts and literature provide an apt way to characterize his own work. In the early verse, the governing analogy is poem-as-painting; later, influenced by his work in the theater, Yeats writes poems analogous to the three-dimensional forms of sculpture. Loizeaux's thorough documentation and scholarly approach make her book a useful contribution to our understanding of Yeats's poetry. (Library Journal)

In this book, Loizeaux, author of a number of articles on Yeats, offers the most closely argued study yet published of the relationship between the development of Yeats's poetics and the development of his conceptions regarding poetry and sculpture. . . Her central thesis [is] that Yeats's conception of the poem as picture gradually gives way to his conception of the poem as sculpture. Here she argues by way of a number of major poems, attempting to trace a central development rather than to be all-inclusive. (Choice)

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