Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is perhaps not a widely known name outside of the States, but he was one of the greats of middle 20th century American art. His oeuvre was American Regionalism, the realist art movement that depicted scenes from the rural, small-town America of the Midwest. Land and people, painted by an artist with an appreciation for nature and the ability to fire the imagination. He was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, into an established art-oriented family, his father being the celebrated artist and illustrator N C Wyeth. Andrew was brought up on the art of Winslow Homer, the poetry of Robert Frost and the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and was thus inspired intellectually as well as artistically.
One of Wyeth’s best-known works is his tempera painting Christina’s World, which is held in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; it was painted in 1948, when he was 31 years old. The work depicts his neighbour, Christina Olson, sprawled on a dry field facing her house in the distance, in Cushing, Maine. Christina had a degenerative muscular disorder that rendered her unable to walk, and she spent most of her time at home. She was firmly against using a wheelchair and so would crawl everywhere, and Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across the field.
Christina’s World
Christina’s World was first exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan in 1948. It received little attention from critics at the time, but Alfred Barr, the founding director of the MoMA, bought the painting for $1,800 and it gradually grew in popularity to the point that today, it is considered an icon of American art. The Olson house itself has been preserved and renovated to match its appearance in Christina’s World, and because of Wyeth’s profile, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in June 2011.
Philistines might say that they “don’t get” poetry because it’s dressed up in flowery language and they can’t understand it. If the objective is to tell a story or communicate a message, they wonder, why dress it up in poetic language so that the meaning is obscured and only serves to create work for the reader to tease out the meaning? Well, I don’t know if such radical philistines actually exist, but I do know that the beauty of poetry is part and parcel of its ability to challenge and inspire the imagination. Neuroscience‑y types will tell you that poetic language bypasses the rational left hemisphere and enters the imaginal realm of the right brain, where metaphorical connections can be made and ideas fused.
Sometimes, though, the poet doesn’t even need to bamboozle us with fancy language – he can literally omit key information from the narrative altogether. One such poem that springs to mind is Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners which relies entirely on the reader’s imagination. The Listeners is one of de la Mare’s most famous poems and certainly one of his most atmospheric. Its theme is the nocturnal encounter between an unnamed “Traveller” and a house inhabited by mysterious “Listeners”. The poem is deliberate in its posing of questions without providing any answers; it’s for the reader to fill in the gaps or, more likely, simply bask in the mystery.
The key characters — the Traveller, the Listeners, and the mysterious “Them” for whom the Traveller has a message — are all unnamed and sparsely described. We know nothing about this Traveller (other than that his eyes are ‘grey’, a nondescript colour that is presumably quite deliberate) nor why he has come knocking on the door of this house. Who are the Listeners, to whom the Traveller declares that he has kept his “word”? We do not know what “word” he is keeping, nor to whom he is keeping it.
But who cares? De la Mare makes great use of sound imagery in this poem, creating a semantic field of sound to intensify the sense of atmosphere. We can imagine how these noises would cut into the silence of a forest by moonlight. The rap on the door, the flutter of the disturbed bird, the words that go echoing through the house, the horse chomping on the forest floor, and when he finally goes off into the darkness, there is the sound of “iron on stone” before the “silence surged softly backward”. The noises in the scene are almost an act of violence upon it.
By the poem’s end, we still don’t know what promise is being kept on this night, nor who the people involved are, but, at the very least, we’re intrigued…marvellous stuff!
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller’s call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, ’Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:— ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de la Mare
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