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Painting, poetry, parallelism: ekphrasis, stylistics and cognitive poetics

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, p.verdonk.uva{at}hetnet.nl

Ekphrasis is a sub-genre of poetry addressing existent or imaginary works of art. Though now a term in poetics, its cultural roots go back to classical rhetoric, which shows that the two have always been in an osmotic relationship. In a wider context, ekphrasis is also the natural outcome of the traditionally strong bond in Western art between poetry and the visual arts, which Aristotle regarded as imitative arts because both make use of mimetic representation. This close link found its fullest expression in Horace’s famous simile Ut pictura poesis. Different periods of Western art history had different ekphrastic agendas, ranging from Homer’s description of the making of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ on some pictures by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Auden may have set the fashion, but as it happened this 16th-century Flemish painter became the favourite muse of a great many other 20th-century poets, in both Europe and the USA. As an illustration of this genre, I present a reading of William Carlos Williams’ s ekphrastic poem ‘The Dance’, which was inspired by Brueghel’s picture ‘The Kermess’. In my analysis I combine the tools of stylistics with those of cognitive poetics, which has embraced the cognitive linguistic theory that any act of language use can potentially be related to some underpinning mental faculty, for example, experience, memory, perception, imagination, and emotion. Along these lines, I try to show how my analysis and reading of the poem’s rhetorical elements, or perceived effects, might be traced to certain underlying cognitive structures such as mentally stored real-world experience, memories and images, genre knowledge, the human delight in repetitive formal patterns, the embodied experience of movement, spatial perception, figure-ground alignments in visual and other sensory perceptions, etc.

Key Words: Brueghel • Pieter • classical rhetoric • cognitive poetics • ekphrasis • figure-ground organization • mimesis • parallelism • Williams • William Carlos • word and image

Language and Literature, Vol. 14, No. 3, 231-244 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0963947005054479


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