Quote:
Originally Posted by Rory Waterman
It was my understanding that Larkin didn't have a specific screen in mind when he wrote 'The Card-Players'. I'm probably misremembering, but if I'm not it surely can't be considered a true example of ekphrasis. Can it?
|
Somewhere on one of these old threads there's a post by Alicia Stallings about her poem "Amateur Iconography: Resurrection," which appears in
Hapax. Although there's an icon of the Harrowing of Hell on the front of the book, Alicia says she had no specific icon in mind for the poem--I've forgotten her words exactly but she talks about the icons as being derived from standard iconographic elements and models. In a case like that, where many icons might be similar, I think a poem could be ekphrastic even without being derived from a unique work. Can Larkin's poem be thought of that way?