The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art.

If "ecphrasis" in its art-historical sense simply designates any description of a piece of art, the poet's encounter with the "silence" of particular works has given rise to a long-standing literary tradition evoked by the word. John Hollander's Gazer's Spirit collects some 50 ecphrastic poems - poems that "speak to" specific paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs. As Hollander promises, we are taken on a walk through a "notional gallery" in which poems and images confront one another. The 19th-century poets include Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Browning, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Whitman; in our century Hollander finds space for W. H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and James Merrill, among others. With each poem we are given a reproduction of the painting and an informative commentary by Hollander. This notional gallery is a gorgeous one.

The book's glory, however, is its ninety-page introduction, which offers something close to a last word on Horace's phrase "Ut pictura poesis": "As painting, so is poesy," in Ben Jonson's translation. But paintings are not mute poems, and poems are not speaking pictures, so misinterpretations of Horace have continually clouded our endless accounts of the relations between poetry and painting. The Romantic tradition is particularly vexed by the dangerous formula "Ut pictura poesis"; Keats only seems to compose a speaking urn, and Turner does not paint silent poems. When criticism has been tempted by these analogies, it has ended in confusion, glorious as that can be in Ruskin or in Pater. The celebrated alliance between the New York Schools of painting and of poetry, with the best poets serving as art critics, has brought little clarification to the study of the poetry of John Ashbery, whatever it may have done to the reception of the Abstract Expressionists.

Hollander's introduction to The Gazer's Spirit rinses away much nonsense on how poems and pictures have interacted. Compared to the darker complexities of interpoetic and intervisual reference, language's and visual imagery's allusions to one another may be relatively free of anxiety. Indeed, poems frequently employ paintings to fend off other poems, while visual works perhaps less often invoke poems in order to evade more direct ancestors.

Hollander subtly comes at these tactics by descrying a certain poetic decorum on one side of the "Ut pictura poesis" equation: "In the presence of a work of Art, Poetry seldom makes the manifest claim that its own further removal gives it a greater authority, and its usual rhetorical stance is awed deference. But just such a claim is often latent."

"Removal" here refers to the argument of Plato's Socrates, for whom a picture of a bed was three removes of imitation away from the Idea of Bedness. It is instructive how many of Hollander's poets modestly intimate a disavowal of their own ability to represent the Idea of Bedness; confronted by the apparent immediacy of paintings, they pretend to yield place. But they then reassert their own freedom and priority by implying their adherence to the Platonic critique of all mimesis. Painters thus are made to seem, if more magical than their poetic admirers, then also more naive. Romantic poetry was a kind of vast visionary cinema, likely to make even Romantic painting seem finite in comparison. William Blake is notoriously more effective as an apocalyptic poet than as an apocalyptic painter. Like Plato, Blake, unmentioned in The Gazer's Spirit, is yet a fascinating ghost in it, if only because he had immeasurable contempt for all Ideas of Bedness.

Hollander slyly omits Plato from his index, presumably because Plato is his book's Shakespearean hero-villain. He does tell us, with no evident slyness, that "ecphrastic poems purport to speak up for the silent picture, to make it speak out in some way." What if I rewrote that as "Strong poems purport to speak up for the too reticent precursor painting, to make it speak out in some way?" I don't believe Hollander would sanction my rewriting, because he certainly does not see the relations between poems and pictures as primarily anxious or defensive. As a poet and a scholarly critic, he regards rhetoric as a mode more of invention than of aggression. Yet his book seems to me an eloquent exposition of a vast minefield of influence struggles between "the sister arts" (as Jean Hagstrum continued to call them, in the best study before Hollander's), which sometimes remind me of the sisterhood of those grand prefeminists Goneril and Regan. One need not be Marx, or even Michel Foucault, to find an analogue in the struggles between social classes and between the sister arts. Hollander's poets may seem to bow reverently before the eloquent silence of the paintings they seek to appropriate, but usurpation is not always a reverent process. Poets rather ruthlessly want to write their poems, and pragmatically the gazer's spirit often reduces even the most awesome painting to so much materia poetica.

This is not to quarrel with Hollander's majestic book, but to learn from it antithetically. As an authority on poetic form, Hollander has no living rival, and perhaps no other contemporary poet knows so much about the visual arts (and music) as does this superb polymath. If I find in The Gazer's Spirit a certain residual Idealism, a last vestige of Platonism, it is because Hollander has invested much of his own spirit in crusades of learned interpretation against the prevalent political polemics that reduce all high art. Of his own fine, meditative poem upon Monet's 1867 painting Snow Effect, Hollander gently admits, "This poem acknowledges the problem of having to be spoken for." That is the sorrow of belatedness, wholly appropriate to our unhappy moment, not so much in the arts as in the study and defense of greatness in art. Hollander knows, better than I do, that Milton's Paradise Lost - an apposite title in the present context - refuses to acknowledge the problem of having to be spoken for. The Gazer's Spirit is at once a gallery, an anthology, and a work of criticism, and is beautiful as all these, but it is also an elegy, more powerful for being involuntary.

Harold Bloom is the author of the forthcoming Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection, to be published by Riverhead Books, New York, in September.