"Large Bad Picture": Positioning the Painting

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the role of paintings in ekphrastic poetry (the rhetorical description of a work of art). It shows how Elizabeth Bishop makes her fictional painting 'real' through her poem, "Large Bad Picture". It presents a comparison between "Large Bad Picture" to W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts." The paper also provides an examination of how Bishop divides her poem between setting the scene and then delivering the poem's argument.

From the Paper:

"Having settled her reader comfortably, Bishop then takes the next two stanzas to describe in clear, precise language the subject of the painting. In one long sentence enjambed over two stanzas, she describes the sunset, the span of high blue cliffs and the small caves that dot their base. The final line of the third stanza returns the reader to the title describing the caves that riddle the cliffs as being "masked by perfect waves." (12). Her description of the waves as being "perfect" give the first hint of her contention that this is a bad picture. The reader begins to understand that this composition, while possibly well executed, is unrealistic, that the painter has seen perfection in natural phenomena that are inherently imperfect and organic."

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