"Infinite shall never meet": Perspective in Martin Johnston's "In the Refectory of the Ognissanti"
Keywords:
Martin Johnston, perspective, postmodern poetryAbstract
Martin Johnston's late poem,"In the Refectory of the Ognissanti", is considered in particular relation to Yves Bonnefoy's conception of perspective in The Arriere-pays (2012) and related essays, and in the light of Modernist re-evaluations of perspective in non-Euclidean geometry. The elegaic concerns of the work are foregrounded in relation to Christopher Pollnitz's characterisation of Johnston as a "new Mannerist" poet, with the poem distinguished from apparently similar postmodern poems in this style, such as those of John Ashbery.References
Bonnefoy, Yves (trans. Stephen Romer). The Arrière-pays. London: Seagull Books, 2012.
Bonnefoy, Yves. The Lure and Truth of Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Johnston, Martin. Cicada Gambit. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983
Lucas, John. “Martin Johnston and the matter of elegy”. Jacket # Eleven. April 2000.
Naughton, John T. The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style. NY: Doubleday, 1955.
Tranter, John (ed.). Martin Johnston: Selected Poems and Prose. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993.
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