Andrew's Wiki
Hiram Powers

Content

• Use art—“art’s fiery finger”—to cure social ills: but recognizes “as if the artist meant her” (intent argument)
  • “To so confront man’s crimes in different lands / With man’s ideal sense.”
  • Art can “pierce to the centre”
• “Appeal, fair stone, / From God’s pure heights of beauty against man’s wrong!”
  • Art has access to God b/c shares beauty
• Aesthetic Becomes Morals: Once he sees beauty in something, can’t exploit it.
  • Compare w/James

Style

• Sonnet
• Strange personification: “East griefs but west” saying that England will grieve what’s happening in New World
• Powerful language
• Allusion to a popular American work of art, mid 19th c, which was connex by American abolitionist presses as being anti-American slavery
  • A Christian Greek woman captured from Turks who invaded her homeland. She is put up for sale, put up to the gaze of potential sellers. What a funny way to interpollate the viewers of the statue itself: we become the slave owners.
  • Displayed at G8 Exhibition, where Browning saw it
  • Sexuality: some people thought the nudity was scandalous, but Powers says that was the narrative! plus she’s being chaste (her hand hiding her sensitive parts)
  • She has a cross (christian) and a locked (beloved)

Quote

• “They say Ideal beauty cannot enter / The house of anguish.” Thus, if Beauty comes in, it will “break up ere long / The serfdom of this world”