Unique Forms of Ekphrasis: The Keepsake and the Illustrative Poetry of the Literary Annuals

Abstract

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• Unique Forms of Ekphrasis: The Keepsake and the Illustrative Poetry of the Literary Annuals
• Michael Carelse (bio)

Introduction

The poems that appear alongside engravings in the literary annuals of the 1820s–1850s have frequently been described as “ekphrastic” works, in that they describe the engravings they accompany.¹ However, the term ekphrasis—commonly defined as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art”²—does not entirely capture many of the context-specific ways in which poems and engravings interact with each other on the material page of the literary annuals. Many definitions of ekphrasis exist. The term originally derives “from the Greek roots ek—out or full—and phrazein—to speak or tell,” and was originally “a rhetorical exercise whereby something was rendered visible for the listener.”³ Some modern scholars have continued to define ekphrasis in this more abstract way as a kind of representational mode—for example, as a “form of vivid evocation that may have as its subject matter anything—an action, a place, a battle, even a crocodile.”⁴ Others have adopted more concrete and simplistic definitions—for example, “the verbal representation of graphic representation.”⁵ Any of these definitions of ekphrasis apply accurately to the poems that accompany engravings in the pages of literary annuals: in all of these ways, the poems describe the engravings. However, these poems describe engravings in particular ways that are unique to the publication format of literary annuals, and as such they present unique forms of ekphrasis that are not yet theorized in current definitions of ekphrasis or in studies of literary annuals. Namely, these poems present forms of ekphrasis that are uniquely characterized by the poems’ functions as literal and conceptual accompaniments to the engravings—typically commissioned to accompany the engraving, the poems were printed alongside the engravings and meant to enhance the reader’s experience of seeing the engravings in the annual. Thus, the poems were not attempting the kind of “vivid evocation” typical of ekphrastic works, because the image being evoked was already available for viewing next to the [End Page 301] poem. Instead, the poems interacted more subtly with the engravings. Sometimes the poems compliment the skill of the engraver or otherwise overtly acknowledge the presence of the engraving; sometimes the poems address the subject of the engraving through poetic apostrophe, add dialogue to animate the subject of an engraving, or direct the reader’s attention to a particular aspect of the engraving. Many poems also make no reference to the engraving or to their own status as accompaniments to an engraving, an artistic choice that also influences how the reader experiences the poem as a representation of the image.

This article offers a new vocabulary for describing the unique forms of ekphrasis present in the illustrative poetry of literary annuals. I argue that illustrative poetry can be divided into three types: explicitly illustrative, in which the poem makes explicit reference to the presence of an engraving; implicitly illustrative, in which the poem does not explicitly announce the presence of an engraving but in which the poem nevertheless points to the engraving in implicit yet unmistakable ways; and apparently non- illustrative, in which the poem does not explicitly or implicitly signal its status as an illustrative poem. Each of these types affords different representational possibilities for the poet, as well as different visual-verbal reading experiences. In attending to these different modes of representation available to writers of illustrative annual poetry, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of this relatively understudied genre of poetry. Moreover, while the forms of ekphrasis described below are specific to the genre of the literary annual, the terms proposed are generalizable beyond literary annuals: for example, apparently non-illustrative poems and prose pieces abound in nineteenth-century periodicals. This article thus presents a larger argument about works “written up” to pictures, which is that all things written up to pictures are ekphrastic, and they can signal their relationship either explicitly, implicitly, or not at all. These ekphrastic works of the nineteenth century are not just pictorial—they are multimodal, and they suggest a nineteenth-century poetics that is not just pictorial, but multimodal.

In offering a...