“Dead Man’s Hand” - The American Scholar

“Dead Man’s Hand” - The American Scholar

There’s a fancy academic term for poems about visual art: ekphrastic. I hate the word, just because of the clunky sound of its first syllables, but I warmly embrace the idea. W. H. Auden based much of his great poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” on the Brueghel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It’s difficult to look at Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror without thinking of John Ashbery’s poem of the same title, one of his most c…