Women and sculptures: femininity in Hart Crane’s Ekphrastic Poems

Abstract

The article explores two poems by Hart Crane, “Interludium” and “To the Empress Josephine’s Statue,” both of which are examples of ekphrasis. Inspired by two sculptures of women, Gaston Lachaise’s La Montagne and Vital Debray’s statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais, the poems in question are at once representations of works of art and of femininity. It is as such that they are scrutinized in an analysis which focuses on poetry, the visual arts and femininity. The article deals with Crane’s use of ekphrasis as a genre, but also with his reflections on time and space, the domains of poetry and sculpture respectively. It also delves into a number of connections evidenced in “Interludium” and “To the Empress Josephine’s Statue”: the one between creation and procreation, understood as maternity, and thus between art and femininity, as well as the ones between femininity on the one hand, and nature, mysticism, morality and history on the other.