Elegy Landscapes

[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 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 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 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