| THROUGH
A DISCUSSION of mechanical, golden, earthly birds turned legendary
(Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth), and urns presented as aesthetic jars, Krieger
resolves the temporal/spatial duality of text/image, to a topos
where poetic language takes on plasticity as well as spatiality. He has
it both ways with the temporal/spatial duality affirmed by Lessing, by
suggesting that in poetry we recognize here-and- now unique concreteness
making ritual motions of aesthetic pattern, echo, and repetition, becoming
"forever-now motions." Krieger presents the possibility of a simultaneous
perception of motion and stasis, and he confronts the Lessing tradition,
with its neat separateness of the mutually delimiting arts, and sees a
time-space breakthrough in the plasticity of the language of poetry. This
language tries to become an object with as much substance as the medium
of the plastic arts, the words thus establishing a plastic aesthetic for
themselves, sometimes using the ekphrastic object as their emblem. Krieger
concludes by making "still movement" ekphrasis an aesthetic criterion:
"I would give the special liberating license to our best poetry, insisting
on its ekphrastic completeness that allows us to transfer the human conquest
of time from the murky subjective caverns of phenomenology to the well-wrought,
well-lighted place of aesthetics." (Jean Jacobson.) |