Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime Details

Review “[A] vibrant dual biography... Plumly's eye for detail and eloquent powers of description make this book a significant work of art history.” - Publishers Weekly“[Plumly] is a particularly effective art historian, capable of re-creating these sublime masterpieces with his inspired prose... A polyphonic, scholarly study of two of art history's most important figures.” - Kirkus“In this erudite and probing study, award-winning poet Stanley Plumly yields new insights into the iconic works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, Britain’s greatest landscape artists. In the pastoral nostalgia of Constable and the modernist fury of Turner, Plumly finds a commonality in their quest to depict the sublime. A compelling portrait of two artists whose work continues to startle and amaze.” - Donna M. Lucey, author of Sargent’s Women“Twining biography with intense meditation on the paintings, Stanley Plumly shows how two starkly different landscape artists made masterpieces from ruin and grief, John Constable in quiet fields and clouds, J.M.W. Turner in scenes of storm and fire. This book is a hymn to art, in itself a work of visionary art.” - Rosanna Warren, author of Ghost in a Red Hat“This is a gorgeous book, visually, conceptually, and in the delights of reading. Stanley Plumly, with intimate immersion in the lives, the world, and the art of these two contemporary nineteenth-century artists, treats us to forty-one prose-poem chapters that are rival works of art in themselves: vignettes of intense, informed imagination, beautifully explicated, delicately informed, sympathetic, revelatory. He thinks as a poet, writes as poet, with the sure-footedness of an informed scholar and on-site researcher. Constable and Turner would come back to life just to see themselves in Elegy Landscapes, and do so, virtually, in Plumly’s vivid illuminations.” - Susan J. Wolfson, professor of English, Princeton University Read more About the Author Stanley Plumly (1939―2019) authored eleven books of poetry, including the National Book Award finalist Old Heart, and four books of nonfiction. His honors include the Paterson Poetry Prize and Truman Capote Award, and he was Maryland’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2018. Read more

Reviews

What purports to be a study of "Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime" has a grand total of EIGHT (8) illustrations, all of them small -- so no "sublime," no matter how intimate. In order to read the book, you'll have to have ready to hand other volumes of paintings by both artists. This should have been made clear in the descriptions of the book, but it wasn't. Why read a book about "the intimate sublime" with almost no visual evidence that can contribute to that?

Share this post