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Poetry

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ananda

(31,218 posts)
Wed Jul 29, 2015, 06:42 PM Jul 2015

On ekphrasis and mythopoesis in written art. [View all]

In the evolution of poetic and narrative art, the penchant for mythmaking (or mythopoeisis) and for illuminating the plastic arts (or ekphrasis) has captured audiences. Who among us doesn’t like to see stories remade or retold in order to gain relevance as society and culture changes or to show new insights and truths? And don’t we also appreciate the way that writers can sometimes make a work of the plastic arts take on new meaning or shape when rendered in the form that artistic language and insight can give it?

In Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus we get a remarkable, transcendent mythopoesis in the retelling of the Faust story through the dark lens of baroque music, and a kind of ekphrasis through a woodcut of Albrecht Dürer called Melancholia I. Mann evokes the diabolus in musica or the Devil in Music, the tritone that was supposed to represent the Trinity but turned out to be so discordant that the Church rejected it as the work of the devil. The Melancholia contains the magic square of sixteen numbers in which any four numbers in a row add up to 32. These symbols from the mists of time work to resonate in the mind of Adrian Leverkuhn, the new wunderkind of musical composition and inform his wish to enter into a devil’s compact in the interests of becoming the world’s greatest composer in order to produce a work of art reflecting of both the glorious brilliance and the hothouse decadence of his modern age.

Previously, in that sublime work of mythopoesis called Joseph and His Brothers, Mann’s audience got a view of a sublime, transcendent myth rendered first in the luminous grammar of lunar syntax and then transmuted into the language of the sun as Joseph was forced by circumstance and his own character flaws into the wider real world of trade, court, and worldly intrigue. Another modern writer in this mythopoetic tradition, James Joyce, also gave us his Ulysses, the great modern version of Homer’s Odyssey. And Andre Gide, in turn, explored the Prometheus myth through a modern, somewhat absurd and ironic lens, in his wonderful story Prometheus Illbound.

In the arena of poetry, mythopoesis also reaches to sublime heights. We get Milton’s marvellous work, particularly that of his epic poem Paradise Lost, which presents a great, rather conflated collage of Greek myth and Christian religion represented in the seemingly endless stream of figures and allusions which populate his story. Then beyond Milton we can look at the poetry of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Guy Davenport for the mythopoesis of a modern age put through the stresses of world war and a sick decline into decadence driven by the parallel decline of aristocratic elitism wishing to hang on to its cultural roots by any means possible. This is the milieu that produced the works that stand out in the arena of mythopoesis and ekphrasis, most tellingly in that of Auden.

Auden is something of an oddity here. Whereas Eliot held onto the last remnants of aristocratic pretension to the end –church, monarchy, and affectation – even while showing its decadent underbelly, Auden seems to have grown out of this pretension as he renders in poetry a wondrous plastic creativity in many forms, playing with formats, conscious of words and phrasing, honoring the past while taking us into a very difficult, complex present with all the angst, irony, and subconscious forces at play that a poet of the 20th century would look to in order to drive us through a new world – modern, enchanted by science and psychology, middle class, crass yet sensitive, mundane yet otherworldly and mythical. Thus, when Auden set out to create a new form in modern language, he never forgot the poetic roots of the past which made it possible and which inform a culture and its language as they grow. After all, in his modernist verse drama Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, he employed the Old English verse form while using the most creatively modern idiom possible.

As for the penchant for ekphrasis, Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” serves well to show us what a poet can do with paintings. First he sets up a theme inherent in the work of the Old Masters, that of the indifference of the peripheral world to suffering and world-changing or remarkable events. Then he gives us a look into two works by Pieter Brueghel which show this theme, first “The Census at Bethlehem” and then a nice segue into “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” The idea of the peripheral indifference to a very important birth, and then to the fall of a dreaming boy out of the sky, is reproduced masterfully as the Old Masters, through Brueghel, are rendered in the language of the poet who sees through art.

And then there is that one-of in the history of literature, Guy Davenport. As Davenport saw it, why confine one’s poetic view of the plastic arts to simple ekphrasis? Why not incorporate as much of the history and detail of myth and art and life as possible into a form capable of carrying it to the reading and listening world? And thereby we get a breathtakingly rich canvas covering a vast panoply of detail as Davenport provides one story after another in different forms – narrative prose, prose poetry, poetry itself, and who knows what else – that draw us into other worlds of unimaginable depth, with each allusion itself an absorbing world and ultimately our own. In this sense, Davenport’s poesis can be a different and extraordinary experience.

In my case, I find myself transported by the story and the form it takes. I admire the playful ingenuity, the unparalleled mastery of vocabulary, phrasing, and allusion. But then I find that I have to make frequent stops to visit a dictionary or source in order to identify a word or an allusion in order to understand it in its place, which often turns out to be another world to fall into and absorb. But the effort always proves to be worth it.

So, in the spirit of poesis and ekphrasis, let’s take Davenport’s poem called “Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard.” The title itself recalls the title of Stanley Spencer’s 1959 painting, now on display at the Tate, titled “The Resurrection, Cookham,” a modern semi-gothic masterpiece depicting the resurrection of the dead in the churchyard cemetery of his home town of Cookham. Spencer even puts himself, naked, in the center of the painting, leaning against a gravestone, not far from his fiancee Hilda sleeping in a bed of ivy. At the top left, we see the pleasure boats of the Thames full of risen souls on a cruise to heaven. Against the churchwall, in unusual positions and attitudes, stand God and angels looking on the scene. The whole panorama has an odd surrealist look which also seems to evoke the essence of Bosch in its oddity, while it also represents a kind of realism of the mundane in its refusal to visually glorify the rising dead or their strangely formed onlookers. There is a certain mannered grotesquerie in the bodies with their stone haloes carved like Roman coins, with all manner of tombs and attendant foliage and blooms that seem to have a certain pre-Raphaelite look about them. And each body exits in its own unique way from an equally unique grave, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed.

Davenport took this graveyard and inhabited it with the dead recalled from centuries of art, mythology, music, history, philosophy, theology, math, science, and literature, with Stanley Spencer in the mix. And then God speaks, introduced by angels ’bells. He talks about the many ways he is represented in the world. He speaks to African figures and evokes himself through their art and nature, and asks them whether they thought that they would not rise again through him. He evokes for them images of resurrection and crucifixion, describing the power he has wielded in the universe of atoms and protons, and then reminding us to Herakleitos who said: “Under the noon Cycladic sun / All is other and all is one”. He goes into the conflation of time, space, and psyche, in juxtaposition with the transporting imagery of the bible: ash of gold, mist of spice, the snail and tendril plinth, the “Burned amber gum of terebinth” associated with Zacharias and sacrifice. He will take mortality from their side. Then he speaks of trombones, music and dance of different kinds and places, and the whole piece ends with a rousing hosanna amidst “The silver C sharp trumpets.”

The language is heady and sublime, carrying the reader into a new world of resurrection, itself reflective of all the worlds created in the people and the images evoked. I almost feel resurrected myself, and each line takes me visually and musically into a place of incredible artistry. It’s as though Spencer’s churchyard has become the centerpoint or axis of the world, and every human being and their world rises from the grave of nothingness, through the imagination, into eternal life. Not only that, but this is achieved through a very trite, archaic verse form, that of iambic tetrameter and rhyming couplets; but this particular meter also has a kind of mesmeric, shamanic effect on the reader; and the language and the allusions are so incredibly rendered with just the right phrasing and beauty that they also drive the verse along. Maybe this is God’s ultimate verse form, I don’t know; but it certainly works.

In an essay, Davenport paid homage to Spencer and to a Welsh poet named David Jones. After exploring Spencer and finding a world of great surprise and artistry, I am now looking forward to reading Davenport’s essay and then exploring the poetic and artistic world of Jones. It never fails to surprise me, the new roads that art can take me down. I will never tire of it.







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