So, what's a "pure" poetic utterance? How are we to define "pure" (let alone agree on who gets to define it)?
I always thought one of the more interesting developments in all of the arts, particularly since the advent of modernism, are these "hybrids." One of my favorite painters, for instance, is Elizabeth Murray, whose shaped canvases bridge the genres of sculpture and painting. ntozake shange's amazing "choreopoem" (her term) for colored girl who have considered suicide when the rainbow/is enuf mixes poetry, dance, music and drama. shange based the work on a series of poems by Judy Grahn, called "The Common Women Poems" and includes in it nursery rhymes, pop songs, and trendy dances. Laurie Anderson's amazing United States, Parts I-IV is a seminal work of performance art, combining music, visual art and spoken word pieces. None of these works are "pure," by anyone's definition.
Artists have always taken source material from wherever they find most useful to suit their purposes. The ekphrastic poems I've read that fail for me do so because they don't do anything with their source material beyond describing it. That may be the same "suspicion" as Housman's, I don't know for certain. But to read something like XJ Kennedy's poem on the Duchamp painting "Nude Descending the Staircase" (based as it is not only on cubism's analysis of the picture plain but also Muybridge's photographs of humans in motion) gives me another way of appreciating the painting. I know I will be remembering "Collects her motions into shape" whenever I see it again.
Thank the heavens for the impure.
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