W. David (William David) Shaw - "If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting (review) - Victorian Studies 43:2 Victorian Studies 43.2 (2001) 354-356 Book Review "If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting "If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting, by Lawrence J. Starzyk; pp. xii + 299. New York: Peter Lang, 1999, $54.95. Lawrence Starzyk's new volume is a commendable effort to accomplish for Victorian poetry and painting what recent studies of ekphrasis have done for cultural studies at large. In asking how accurately and resourcefully William Wordsworth and his Victorian heirs recreate paintings in their poems, Starzyk is also inviting critics to consider how far poetry should aspire toward the condition of the visual arts and how a good poem can even surpass its visual model. In becoming one of Andrea del Sarto's incarnated canvases, for example, to what extent does Robert Browning's beautiful but soulless Lucrezia allow the appreciative but critical poet to exceed in insight the painter who inspires him? One may feel that Browning's monologues on art are not...