A Case of Cameos: Classical Ekphrasis and The English Parnassian Movement

The English Parnassian Movement, a poetic trend spanning nearly two decades, from the 1870s to the late 1880s, still lacks a comprehensive critical assessment. In a bid to contribute to a more nuanced view of the Movement, this article focuses on its interartistic dimension, discussing the intersections of visual art with the poetic principles of English Parnassianism, and then re-considering the privileged link between Parnassian ekphrasis and classical antiquity. In doing so, it focuses on texts that have been generally neglected by critics. More in particular, this article explores the metapoetic connotations of Graham R. Tomson’s literary-historical account of ancient epigrams, and then carries out a close reading of Austin Dobson’s poetic sequence A Case of Cameos (1877), which is a perfect example of the Parnassian ekphrastic trope of the poem as a carved precious stone. My article closes with an account of Andrew Lang’s deployment of the same trope in his sequence Cameos: Sonnets from the Antique (1884). On a first level, this article aims to add to the critical reflections on ekphrasis and interartistic modalities in Parnassian (and Victorian) poetry. On a second level, it seeks to analyze a few lesser-known Parnassian poems as well as to lay the ground for a much-needed systematic discussion of the classical components of the English Parnassian Movement. In this sense, my article may help fill two of the main gaps in the current scholarship on English Parnassianism, that is to say the overly limited selection of poetic works that have come under textual scrutiny and an insufficiently systematized definition of the movement.