The Poetess Poem Analysis

In her poem ‘The Poetess’, Guest engages with the painting La Poétesse by the Spanish painter Joan Miró. Part of the Constellations, the gouache was painted in 1940., while Miró was fleeing the Nazis. Miró grew hopeless and had ‘the idea of expressing this mood and this anguish by drawing signs and forms … which would go up and caress the stars, fleeing from the stink and decay of a world built by Hitler and his friends.’ Miró, who never fully associated with a single style, gained his spontaneous quality noted in the Constellations from the surrealist movement. His painting La Poétesse, served as inspiration both for Guest and for the French writer André Breton in their equally titled poems ‘The Poetess’. While both writers engage with the painting each does so in a very different manner.

Breton publishes his poem ‘The Poetess’ in 1959., as part of his series of ekphrastic poems Constellations written in response to Miró’s collection of the same name. The poem is representative of the darkness and uproar of the time of the painting’s creation, as it takes place ‘amid detonations of matchlocks’ (1). The poem takes from Breton’s oeuvre as the founder of the surrealist movement, with surreal images such as the poetess as ‘the Beautiful Ropemaker of our time’ (1). Although the poem carries

The poem demonstrates Guest’s triangulation of the painter, the painting, and the poem, out of which arises an interesting glimpse at the writer herself, a self-portrait of sorts. Her ekphrastic poems are painterly poems, abiding by Davidson’s ideas of reading the greater painterly aesthetic emitted by the painting. Guest places Miró’s technique and aesthetic in her own work as evidenced in ‘The Poetess’, not only does the language of the colours and the dollops, but also the syntax and the punctuation echo the painter’s aesthetic. However, Guest doesn’t simply copy Miró, she engages with his