Abstract
A review of Peter Steele’s: The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, in which Steele writes poems on and to paintings and the sculpture Black Sun (By Inge King) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Each work on which there is a poem is reproduced. In this book Steele writes more to the ‘contour’ of the topic-work than he did in Plenty. His poems – as ever sidenoted – are tensed between the topicality of the work of art in question, and Kant’s aesthetic which involves ‘the free play of the cognitive faculties’. In ths tension lies the particular pleasure of Steele’s poetry.
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Notes
(See review article on Plenty, Sophia, vol 46, no.1). It is curious to note that the puzzling ‘altiplano’ of the poem on the Crivelli Annunciation in Plenty, turns up again in a very nice poem on an equally nice Jules Bastien-Lepage, (1848–1884), October of pretty peasant girls gathering potatoes: ‘labor and beauty in the one breath’. The poem begins: ‘Down from the altiplano, beyond forests / haunted by Inca and jaguar, truffled / aboard the caravels, hauled by ocean and mule back... / to the old coasts of a new world / decked with blossom and berry, it’s gone to earth.’ The vegetable context (‘...truffled / aboard the caravels...’) makes more perspicuous the use of the word ‘altiplano’ than does the descent of the Holy Ghost on the B.V.M. in the London Crivelli.
Michael Innes, Operation Pax, Penguin edition (C2203) pp. 304–05. ‘M.I.’ was the pseudonym of J.I.M. Stewart (nat. Edinburgh 1906—obit. 1994, Surrey, Eng.) who was, among other things, Jury Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, 1935–1945; Reader in English, in the University of Oxford 1969–1973; and Student of Christchurch, Oxford, 1949–1975.
The oblique in poetry–from The Waste Land on–comes under the Kantian definition of the aesthetic as engaging and enabling ‘the free play of the cognitive faculties’. See The Critique of Judgment, part I, section 9, etc. Helen Cooper reviewing a book on John Skelton in The London Review of Books, (Vol. 28, No. 24, 14 December 2006, p.32c), writes of ‘Speak, Parrot’, ‘It rejoices in an obscurity of form and a tumble of multilinguism that puts The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos in the shade, but which like them, catches the ear and the imagination ahead of any perception of coherent meaning. (Italic added) The high point of this in the 21st century so far may be the poetry of John Ashbery, but the sentence in italic is an acute phenomenology of reading. Apply it to Steele and you will find that you have been doing this all along, running ahead to catch up with his meaning by getting there, as it were, before him. You and he ‘prevent’ his sense, as that word is used in the Anglican Prayer Book.
As with his remarks on visual art which at bottom favour abstraction, Kant’s formula of the aesthetic has had to wait for poetic forms unknown to him to satisfy it. The Elizabethan Skelton wrote too soon, Pound and Eliot, for Kant himself, too late. For us, it all fits.
‘Battle stallion / wreathed in thunder’ / in the second stanza may refer across to a painting by Benjamin Robert Heydon (1786–1846) Marcus Curtius and Steele’s own poem Heydon about this picture: ‘...so here/ is Marcus Curtius plunging into the chasm, / his face my own and his wrought-out spirit’. The Whispering Gallery, pp.56–57. The Authorial reference was Job, Ch.39, v.19.
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The Whispering Gallery was briefly reviewed by Patrick Hutchings in the Melbourne newspaper The Age A2, Saturday, December 23, 2006, ‘Books’ p. 21.
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Hutchings, P. Listening to Pictures. SOPHIA 46, 193–198 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0023-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0023-6
Keywords
- STEELE Peter. The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry. The National Gallery of Victoria. BROWN Joseph Collection. Inge KING, Black Sun
- SKELTON John: ELIOT T.S., The Waste Land. POUND Ezra, Cantos
- KANT Immanuel, his definition of the aesthetic as ‘the free play of the cognitive faculties’. COOPER Helen.