Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited (1967)

The point of Krieger’s 1967 article was to trace his own development in treating the literary/art historical genre ekphrasis, but also to suggest some application of the ekphrastic principle "to what we used to call primary literary works." In this article then, through a discussion of mechanical, golden, earthly birds turned ledgenday (Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth), and urns presented as aesthetic jars, Krieger resolves the temporal/spatial duality of text/image, to a topos where poetic language takes on plasticity as well as spatiality. Krieger has it both ways with the temporal/spatial duality affirmed by Lessing by suggesting that in poetry we recognize here-and-now unique concreteness making ritual motions of aesthetic pattern, echo and repetition, becoming "forever-now motions." Krieger presents the possiblity of a simultaneous perception of motion and stasis, and he confronts the Lessing tradition, with its neat separateness of the mutually delimiting arts, and sees a time-space breakthrough in the plasticity of the language of poetry. This language tries to become an object with as much substance as the medium of the plastic arts, the words thus establishing a plastic aesthetic for themselves, sometimes using the ekphrastic object as their emblem. His discussion concludes with inclusion of this "still movement" ekphrastic agenda into his aestheic theory: "I would give the special liberating license to our best poetry, insisting on its ekphrastic completeness that allows us to transfer the human conquest of time from the murky subjective caverns of phenomenology to the well-wrought, well-lighted place of aesthetics."
As W. J. T. Mitchell, notes in "Ekphrasis and the Other." (a web article reproduced as part of the Romantic Circles Electronic Edition of Shelley's "Medusa" by kind permission of the University of Chicago Press, from Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1994.) Murry's essay above, "...has without question been the single most influential statement on ekphrasis in American criticism." Readers will now also find this essay incorporated by Krieger as an appendix to the booklength study under examination in this paper, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
 

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