Volume 24, Number 20 · December 8, 1977
Talkies
By John Hollander
Speaking Pictures
edited by Milton Klonsky
Harmony Books, 333 pp., $5.95 (paper)
The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures
by D.J. Gordon, edited by Stephen Orgel
University of California Press, 338, 75 illus pp., $22.50
Poems are like pictures. But some poems are more like pictures than others. Milton Klonsky's delightful, provocative, but somewhat confusing book is an annotated anthology of what he calls 'pictorial poetry,' mostly in English, from the sixteenth century to the present. By pictorial poems he means very different sorts of texts. The first and most important of these is the Renaissance emblem poem. Indeed Klonsky's own concept of the pictorial and its role in linguistic texts derives from the emblem poem, which probably partly accounts for his beginning his selection in the sixteenth century, instead of in Hellenistic times.
Review, 3923 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |