Frame, Glass, Verse - by Rayna Kalas (Hardcover)

About the Book

In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought--from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"--Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in...

Book Synopsis

In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought--from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"--Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial.

Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images--in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe--together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period.

Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.

Review Quotes

A welcome and persuasive book, not only for Renaissance scholars but for all readers of poetry and poetics.

In Frame, Glass, Verse, Rayna Kalas shows the way the mindset worked when poesis was still the same as techne. In the figurative language and its subtle complexity and multiple meanings of Renaissance literature, she finds the conceptual frame, the reflective mirror or 'perspective glass, ' the power of prosody and what Coleridge was to call 'the esemplastic power of the imagination.'... The result is nothing less than a new window opening on Renaissance literature. We see through this 'magic casement, ' as Keats put it, the way those texts were first intended to be seen, not distorted by our more modern ways of thought or ideas about the nature and use of literature which was constructed and intended as a 'through-shine' communication but created by minds rather unlike our twenty-first century ones.

Kalas is finely tuned to the work that words do. Throughout the book, Kalas unpacks poetic conceits, spins out elaborate etymologies, and follows Raymond Williams and Reinhart Koselleck in considering the ways in which key words can teach us about social and conceptual structures.... Frame, Glass, Verse will appeal to more than editors and critics: a contribution to the history of optics and philosophy as well as literature, this lucid and wide-ranging book has much to teach scholars who are interested in all aspects of Renaissance word and worldmaking.

Probably the most exciting insight Kalas makes is that to frame meant, in essence, to make rather than to delineate, and that a revision in our understanding of the term necessitates a reconsideration of poetic making: words were understood as material and temporal matter, as distinguished from divine essence.... Overall this is an innovative, wide-ranging and provocative book.

This intelligent and subtle book joins a growing body of work that reinterprets Renaissance culture in light of the material conditions of lived experience.... Like a good steel glass, [this book] reflects an abundance of hard work and exquisite craftsmanship.

About the Author

Rayna Kalas is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University.