The Eye of the Poet

The ten essays in The Eye of the Poet examine poetic texts on real or imaginary painting and sculpture. Written by both art historians and literary historians, this collection is truly interdisciplinary between the sister arts of painting and poetry, or image and word. Methodologically diverse, the essays combine current critical approaches with historical ones.

Unifying the essays is a prime emphasis of the analyses of viewer and reader, artist and audience, meaning in text and image, and criticism and its history. All of these concerns relate to ekphrasis as an interpretive strategy.

. Providing a variety of case studies involving poetic texts from the Renaissance to the present, this collection responds to the need for intensive analysis of critical instances of poetic interpretation of imagery, and offers significant advances in the growing field of text/image study.