In The Modern Portrait Poem, Frances Dickey recovers the
portrait as a poetic genre from the 1860s through the 1920s. Combining literary and art history, she
examines the ways Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and J. M. Whistler transformed the
genre of portraiture in both painting and poetry. She then shows how their new ways of looking at
and thinking about the portrait subject migrated across the Atlantic to influence Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, E. E. Cummings, and other poets. These poets creatively
exposed the Victorian portrait to new influences ranging from Manet's realism to modern dance,
Futurism, and American avant-garde art. They also condensed, expanded, and combined the genre
with other literary modes including epitaph, pastoral, and Bildungsroman. Dickey
challenges the tendency to view Modernism as a break with the past and as a transition from aural to
visual orientation. She argues that the Victorian poets and painters inspired the new generation of
Modernists to test their vision of Aestheticism against their perception of modernity and the
relationship between image and text. In bridging historical periods, national boundaries, and
disciplinary distinctions, Dickey makes a case for the continuity of this genre over the
Victorian/Modernist divide and from Britain to the United States in a time of rapid change in the
arts.
