Two Reviewers of Hollander's The Gazer's Spirit
Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler

Harold Bloom:

"Sister Acts." 1996. Artforum S(SUM) 1996. p9. Harold Bloom. (Book review of Hollander's The Gazer's Spirit.)

In Bloom's opinion, "The Romantic tradition is particularly vexed by the danergous formula "Ut pictura poesis"; Keats only seems to compose a speaking urn, and Turner does not paint silent poems. When criticism has been tempted by these analogies, it has ended in confusion, glorious as that can be in Ruskin or in Pater. The celebrated alliance between the New York Schools of painting and of poetry, with the best poets serving as art critics, has brought little clarification to the study of the poetry of John Ashbery, whatever it may have done to the reception of the Abstract Expressioninists."

He also notes that "Compared to the darker complexities of interpoetic and intervisiual reference, language's and visual imagery's allusions to one another maybe relatively free of anxiety. Indeed, poems frequently employ paintings to fend off other poems, while visual works perhaps less often invoke poems in order to evade more direct ancestors."

Bloom chides Hollander in noting that Plato is missing from Hollander's index and comments at length: "It is instructive how many of Hollander's poets modestly intimate a disavowal of their own ability to represent the Idea (of Bedness); confronted by the apparent immediacy of paintings, they pretend to yield place. But they then reassert their own freedom and priority by imploying their adherence to the Platonic critque of all mimesis. Painters thus are made to seem, if more magical than their poetic admirers, then also more naive."

His review also makes the following points:

• "Hollander's poets may seem to bow reverently before the paintings they seek to appropriate, but usurpation is not always a reverent process. Poets rather ruthlessly want to write their poems, and pragmatically the gazer's spirit often reduces even the most awesome painting to so much materia poetica."
• "As a poet and scholarly crtic, he regards rhetoric as a mode more of invention than of aggression. Yet his book seems to me an elequent exposition of a vast minefield of influence struggles between "the sister arts" (as Jean Hagstrum continued to call them, in the best study before Hollander's). "
• "I find in The Gazer's Spirit a certain residual Idealism, a last vestige of Platonism, it is because Hollander has invested much of his own spirit in crusades of learned interpretation against the prevelent political polemics that reduce all high art. ...Of his own poem upon Monet's Snow Effect, ...Hollander admits "This poem acknowedges the problem of having to be spoken for." That is the sorrow of belatedness, wholly appropriate to our unhappy moment, not so much in the arts as in the study and defense of greatness in art."

Helen Vendler:

"Worth a Thousand Words?" Helen Vendler. New York Review of Books. V43, N8 (May 9), 1996. p.39-42

As a critic, Vendler has much to say in this reveiw concerning the theoretical uses of ekphrasis. "Poetry and representational painting are openly thematic in a way that music and abstract painting are not. The subject offers an opening for the critic as well as for the artist; and from the visible and discussable theme (of the painting, of the poem) one can proceed to more refined discussions of the visual media (easel painting, etching, etc.) as they might correspond to the language and particular forms of poetry."

And she speculates on the practice of ekphrasis: "There are two chief reasons why poets love the stimulus to description offered by a work of art. First, description is par exellence a means of multiplying words. Any verbal description is potentially unlimited, and the more slender the point d'appui on which the fantasy-construct of words is raised, the more magnificent and self-sustaining (as in Ashbery's "Self Portrait") is the effect created. On the other hand, a visual image can also be a challenge to the usual concision of lyric. The richer the original artwork, the greater praise accrues to the author who can convey its power with compression and point--as in, for instance, the sestet of Rossetti's sonnet on da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks:"

In Vendler's opinion. "The poems gain immensely from being read along with the visual images that provoked them. And Hollander, a gifted guide to each combination of poem and painting, is at his most original in his commentary on half-forgotten poems by Dante Gabriel rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne: these Victorian poets are resurrected by the force of his attention to them and his understanding of their receptivity to painted images."

Vendler percieves the focus of The Gazer's Spirit as follows: "Hollander has the literary historian's appetite for anything that will help answer his central questions: What do poets see in paintings, and how does poetry discover itself, by similarity and difference, in painting?"

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