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3 Introduction In 1908, t. s. eliot saw a painting by Manet and described it in one of his first poems, “On a Portrait.” A year and a half later, he began “Portrait of a Lady” in his rooms at Harvard, finishing it in Paris in November, but keeping it to himself until he met Ezra Pound in London four years later. In the meantime, Pound had written several of his own portraits, including “Portrait d’une femme” (1912), and went on to develop the genre in the sequences “Moeurs Contemporaines” and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Pound’s college friend William Carlos Williams wrote a “Self-Portrait” series in 1914, followed by “Portrait of a Woman in Bed,” “Portrait in Greys,” his own “Portrait of a Lady,” and other poems with similar titles. Back from the war, E. E. Cummings assembled a sequence of portraits in his manuscript Tulips and Chimneys (1922). This flowering of the portrait poem was not a case of mutual influence, for in most cases the poets were drawn to it before they knew each other’s writing. Yet the appearance of these works at the very moment of modernization in poetry was also not exactly spontaneous or unprecedented: the portrait poem was a familiar nineteenth-century genre. In the 1860s Dante Gabriel Rossetti and members of his circle had transformed the Victorian portrait poem by bringing it into conversation with new techniques in figure painting. In their exchanges they explored the relations between surface and depth, exterior and interior, as aspects of both art and persons. Around 1908 a new generation of American poets began writing under the sign of Aestheticism and adopted its characteristic genre, making the portrait a vessel for similar questions about identity, interiority, and the relationship between images and words. Why did the portrait appeal to these young poets at the outset of their careers? Calling a poem “Portrait” in 1912 identified the work with a set 2 The Modern Portrait Poem of well-established conventions and precedents. Like other generic titles, such as “Elegy” or “Song,” “Portrait” oriented the reader’s expectations, making the poem legible even if it went on to disrupt those expectations . While the Modernist portrait poem belongs in a lineage of Victorian poems of the same kind, it also reaches out across the boundaries of media, hailing the visual arts as a point of reference. This combination of generic connectedness and intermedial flexibility made the portrait an ideal vehicle for early Modernist experimentation. The interconnection of the arts in Modernism is well known; indeed, the spontaneous selfmodernization that occurred in Anglo-American literature around the time of World War I is often attributed to the influence of the visual arts, in particular Futurism and Cubism. When Virginia Woolf claimed that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” she may have been referring to the impact of the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, which introduced the work of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso to London and, along with the 1910 lectures of Futurist F. T. Marinetti, created an avant-garde sensibility overnight. Our current understanding of the relationship of visual art and poetry in Modernism still hinges on this event, viewed as a break with the past. It is standard to credit Futurism and Cubism with ushering in poetic Modernism by creating the visual sensibility that ruptured the traditions of genre and representation.1 Nineteen-ten to 1913 was unquestionably a period of intense exchange between the arts that led to radical changes in the practice of poetry. Yet that narrative of Modernism ignores the significance of visual art in Victorian culture , including poetry.2 In this book I argue that an earlier moment of exchange and collaboration between art and poetry in the Rossetti circle fostered the visual sensibility and interest in issues of portraiture that became central to American Modernist poetry. In the 1860s, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, and Algernon Swinburne explored the possibilities of portraiture in a rapid exchange of related works. In a series of paintings of women, Rossetti and Whistler shifted their emphasis from the illusion of depth (both as a visual quality and a trait of the portrait subject) to an aesthetic of surface and pattern. At the same time, Rossetti and Swinburne composed ekphrastic poems about these paintings, poems that called into question the conventions of the Victorian portrait poem. The Rossetti circle thus used the portrait to raise questions that would again preoccupy Modernist poets around 1910. Does...

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