James Schuyler’s Epistolary Poetry: Things, Postcards, Ekphrasis

The critical reception of James Schuyler has emphasized his “descriptive exactness,” “precision of detail” and embrace of what is everyday and ordinary: elements seen as elaborating a new relationship to “things as they are” and to objects generally. This essay shows how such aspects are complicated by important facets of Schuyler’s work that have been insufficiently studied. Chief among them would be ekphrasis, which insists on the means of representation rather than the thing represented, and the trope of the letter-poem, which inscribes objects and words in intersubjective relationships of exchange and mediation of affect. Schuyler as poet of detailed observation can be understood only in the context of Schuyler as poet of address, interpellation and figural language.