Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World

Bonnie Costello

Published by Cornell University Press 2008

Planets on Tables

Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World

Bonnie Costello

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501727047

Overview
Contents

About this book

Poets have long been drawn to the images and techniques of still life. Artists and poets alike present intimate worlds where time is suspended in the play of form and color and where history disappears amid everyday things. The genre of still life...

Author / Editor information

Bonnie Costello is Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, and Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. She is the editor of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore.

Reviews

Jane Hedley, K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College:

Still life does its political work not polemically but by awakening and sustaining our desire for an 'amenable world.' In this splendid book Bonnie Costello, one of our most important scholars of twentieth-century poetry, teaches us to draw sustenance from the genre Pliny the Elder called 'the lowest of the art forms,' but whose mandate in dark times is to remind us 'just how fragile ordinary living really is.' Costello is deeply conversant with both lyric poetry and visual art; she is also more broadly committed to exploring how artistic choices come to have political meaning. This is poetry criticism at its most buoyant and supple—a quietly luminous book.

Heather Dubrow, author of The Challenges of Orpheus and Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor of English, University of Wisconsin–Madison:

Bonnie Costello, long recognized as among our most gifted readers of modern poems, additionally brings to her new book her extensive knowledge of the visual arts and her acuity about broader issues in poetics. Persuasively establishing still life as paradigmatic of how the lyric mode relates public and private worlds, Planets on Tables will be of interest not only to students of modernism but also to anyone engaged with lyric poetry.

Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia:

A beautifully written study of modern American poetry and the still life, Planets on Tables shows how object poems, far from retreating into the static decorum of miniature, subtly register the large-scale shocks of history. Nuanced and superbly lucid, Bonnie Costello's readings reveal lyric poetry's interweaving of inner and outer worlds, war and household interiors, public and private spheres. This book renews our sense of the power of poetry to be true to the incessant interplay between the imagination and the planet of which it is a part.

Bonnie Costello argues for still life as a mode of juxtaposition that can hold contrary ideas at a standstill without merging or synthesizing them. Far from being a minor genre, still life becomes, for the author, the aesthetic end of the more politicized modernism of the 1930s (a point that is qualitatively different from the argument that still life was deliberately aesthetic). In Costello's modeling, still life is not restricted to its material components but can include radio waves, foreign news, technology, cinema, even the artist's vocation.... She concentrates on one visual artist, Joseph Cornell, juxtaposing him to canonical American poets Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and the academically undertreated Richard Wilbur. In so doing, she virtually wipes out the past generation's distinction between the subjective Stevens and the quasi-objective Williams—a fruitful side effect of her inventive exploration of intermedial crossings.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
ILLUSTRATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
PREFACE: APOLOGIES FOR POETRY Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
INTRODUCTION: CRUDE FOYERS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Wallace Stevens: Local Objects and Distant Wars Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
2. William Carlos Williams: Contending in Still Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
3. Elizabeth Bishop's Ethnographic Eye Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
4. Joseph Cornell: Soap Bubbles and Shooting Galleries Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
5. Richard Wilbur: Xenia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Conclusion: Domestic Disturbance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 224
Illustrations
- Other: 13 halftones
Keywords: Literary Studies; Poetry & Criticism

eBook

Published: July 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501727047