Ekphrasis in reverse: The use and
abuse of poetry in popular films
Bent Sørensen
Aalborg University, Denmark
Abstract
This paper discusses the uses and abuses of poetry in two
recent, popular American and British films.
Poetry in some instances travels from the field of high
culture and is recuperated from obscurity by being quoted
in mainstream feel-good dramas.
However, along the transtextual path something is also
lost, and rather than simple quotation, what happens to
the poems in question is something beyond the list of
relations suggested in the call for papers: “quotation,
allusion, plagiarism, pastiche, parody, counterfeit[ing]…”
Abstract cont’d
In 4 Weddings and a Funeral (1993) we all share a
common tear at the death of one of the minor characters,
especially when his male lover recites a W.H. Auden poem
at his funeral. Poetry is thus used to heighten emotional
expression and character empathy, but is only present in
this one interlude in what remains a quintessential low
culture product, a romantic comedy.
In contrast a thoroughly melodramatic film such as Dead
Poets Society (1989) uses Walt Whitman throughout as a
poetic beacon, whose poems and life are suggested as a
model for the young protagonists to follow in their quest
for individuality and Bildung. In this film poetry
functions as a metaphor for pedagogy and guided selfexpression.
Abstract cont’d
Despite the contrasts between how poetry is
represented in the two movies, both can be
regarded as instances of ekphrasis in reverse.
In these films the presence of poems as high culture
manifestations is further used to signify queerness,
which in the English case is safely bracketed via its
status as the one funeral among four weddings,
and which in the American film is only suggested
as a deeply buried subtext (a homosocial rather
than homoerotic bonding).
Why is poetry queer and Scottish, or mad and Indian
when used as reverse ekphrastic interludes in
popular films such as these?
Poetry and Film
• Poetry as paratext: Titles etc.
• Poetry as accompaniment: Quotation
• Poets as subject matter: Biopics
• Poetry as subject matter: Theme (or Metaphor
for Life)
Ekphrasis
• ek (out) phrasein (to speak) – speaking out
• Give a full account
• Make a vivid description
• Perform a translation from one medium to
another, for instance image into words
Poetry as Ekphrasis
• Poem about an image (portrait)
• Images about a poem (portrait in words),
i.e. reverse ekphrasis
Ut pictura poesis
Ut pictura poesis: “as is painting so is poetry,” is
often either implicitly or explicitly reversed to “as is
poetry so is painting,” to indicate an extended analogy,
if not an identification, between the two media. This
classical theory of parallels between the arts was
widely held and developed, especially from the Middle
Ages through the Enlightenment, and served as the
testing ground for theories of imitation and as the
incubator for systematic aesthetics. The discussions
often revolved around “natural” (painting) and
“arbitrary” (language) signs and symbols, and the questions, usually unstated until the eighteenth century,
were “How does painting or poetry communicate?”
and “What are the limits of each medium in time and
space?”
4 Weddings and a Funeral, 1993
Directed by Mike Newell, written by
Richard Curtis
Comedy of manners, happy ending, tragic
interlude featuring poetry
4 Weddings
“Funeral Blues”
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
“Funeral Blues”
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Auden, 1907-1973
Auden caricature
Auden in the garden
Isherwood & Auden
Auden as his own double
Photo by Cecil Beaton
Auden & Chester Kallman
Another Auden poem
O but he was fair as a garden in flower,
As slender and tall as the great Eiffel Tower,
When the waltz throbbed out on the long promenade
O his eyes and his smile they went straight to my heart;
'O marry me, Johnny, I'll love and obey':
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover,
You'd the sun on one arm and the moon on the other,
The sea it was blue and the grass it was green,
Every star rattled a round tambourine;
Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay:
But you frowned like thunder and you went away.
Sexuality in Auden
Auden did not categorize himself a gay poet, but had no
trouble with his sexual orientation. Knowledgeable readers and
associates knew Auden was gay, despite the fact that he never
published any of his blatantly homoerotic work under his own name.
Among that “blatant” work were sexually explicit poems
written in German in the 1920s, “Pleasure Island” and a poem
not included in any of his collections called
“A Day for a Lay” which describes the process of picking up
and performing oral sex on a 24-year-old mechanic named Bud.
Reception of Auden
Auden's early poetry breathed an air of revolutionary freshness.
In language at once exotic and earthy, alternately banal and
elegant, colloquial yet faintly archaic, Auden's verse diagnosed
psychic disturbances with an extraordinary resonance.
Although most of his early poems have their origins in his
personal anxieties, especially those related to his homosexuality
and his search for psychic healing, they seemed to voice the
fears and uncertainties of his entire generation.
- Claude J. Summers
Dead Poets Society, 1989
Directed by Peter Weir, written by Tom
Schulman
Drama, tragic ending, comic interludes
featuring poetry
Sweaty Toothed Madman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! cont’d
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung -- for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths -- for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Song of Myself
52
I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Calamus poem
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going—North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying—elbows stretching—fingers clutching,
Armed and fearless—eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning—sailing, soldiering, thieving,
threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming—air breathing, water drinking, on the
turf of the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.
Calamus symbolism
Whitman's symbol for gay love is the calamus plant, calamus
acornus, colloquially called the “sweet-flag” which he refers to as
“the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.” It is a
hardy perennial that grows by ponds in the mid-eastern States, and has
three-foot high tufts, long pointed leaves, yellow-green spikes, and
huge sprawling rhizomes (tubers or “roots”) that closely resemble
penises in various stages of tumescence. It is named after the river
god Calamus who grieved for the death by drowning of his boy lover
Carpus. – Rictor Norton
Song of Myself
45
O span of youth! ever-push'd elasticity!
O manhood, balanced, florid and full.
My lovers suffocate me,
Crowding my lips, thick in the pores of my skin,
Jostling me through streets and public halls, coming naked to me at night,
Crying by day, Ahoy! from the rocks of the river, swinging and
chirping over my head,
Calling my name from flower-beds, vines, tangled underbrush,
Lighting on every moment of my life,
Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses,
Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine.
Song of Myself cont’d
A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do
not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.
See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.
My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.
Whitman nude?
Whitman with Doyle
Whitman in a sea of poems
Sexuality in Whitman
Themes of sex and sexuality have dominated Leaves of Grass from
the very beginning and have shaped the course of the book's
reception. The first edition in 1855 contained what were to be called
“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” and “I Sing the Body Electric,”
which are ‘about’ sexuality (though of course not exclusively)
throughout. From the very beginning, Whitman wove together
themes of ‘manly love’ and ‘sexual love,’ with great emphasis on
intensely passionate attraction and interaction, as well as bodily
contact (touch, embrace) in both. Simultaneously in sounding these
themes, he equated the body with the soul, and defined sexual
experience as essentially spiritual experience. He very early adopted
two phrenological terms to discriminate between the two
relationships: “amativeness” for man-woman love and
“adhesiveness” for “manly love.” – James E. Miller, Jr.
Reception of Whitman
Betsy Erkkila relates the case of a public service announcement dealing with
Whitman's sexual orientation (in an attempt to offer support to lesbian and gay
teenagers) that was refused by all six Philadelphia television stations, in two cases
on the advice of the director of the Walt Whitman Poetry Center, who feared that
the announcement would be “detrimental” to the Center's educational efforts.
Leaves of Grass still appears on the usual lists of banned books, and anyone who has
taught Whitman knows that both of the objections current in 1855 remain firmly
entrenched: his poems are not really poems, and whatever they are, they are
“dirty.” – Jason Paul Mitchell
An All-American Queer?
Whitman is America's greatest embarrassment, because if what he says about
democracy is true, then the American ideal of universal equality is inherently
homosexual, and homosexual love is the physiological basis of democracy.
Whitman is a much more subversive and radical poet than even Jean Genet,
and American school children for the past half-century have been carefully
protected from exposure to America's greatest poet. - Rictor Norton
4 Weddings and a Funeral
• Primary objective in life is to love and marry (in
fact marry the one you love)
• Marriage only temporarily pauses in the face of
death, but love persists
• To the marriage of true minds we admit no
impediments… (cf. Shakespeare)
4 Weddings cont’d
• Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit
impediments.
• Not even queerness!
• (Although the vast majority of the characters are
straight….)
Dead Poets Society
• Carpe diem
• To thine own self be true
• Don’t be afraid to be different
• Don’t be too different, if you can help it
• It’s OK to be different as long as your father
doesn’t know how different you are
• Acting out/Coming out can be fatal!
Discourse Hierarchy in 4 Weddings:
Queer - Straight
• Queerness is an anomaly but acceptable if
bracketed by hetero-sexuality
• Queerness is punishable by death in a figurative
sense
Discourse Hierarchy in 4 Weddings:
Sexuality and nation
• Queerness is related to Scottish-ness, a form of
primitivism
• English-ness and American-ness can go
together, but not without prolonged negotiation
• Scottish-ness is therefore the excluded middle
in that equation
Discourse Hierarchy in Dead Poets Society:
Queer - Straight
• Queerness is an anomaly, but homo-social
behaviour is acceptable if bracketed by heterosexuality
• Queerness is punishable by death, but suicide is
sufficient self-punishment
• Queerness is related to art, poetry and teaching
(cf. pederasty)
Discourse Hierarchy in Dead Poets Society:
Nation/Ethnicity and Sexuality
• Queerness is always already inscribed in
American-ness, but covertly…
• Primitivism (Native Indian) is equated with
virility, but still a bit queer…
• Bonding and mating rituals are closely
intertwined
The (happy) end:
It’s all straightened out now…