Greg Barnhisel

Greg Barnhisel holds a Ph.D. in American literature. In this essay, he discusses how Viereck uses "For An Assyrian Frieze " to respond to some of his most important predecessors in poetic history.

Poets have always responded to works of art, and written poems about their responses. But ever since the Romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the discussion of or response to another work of art has become an extremely common topic in English-language poetry. The fact that this topic became so widespread in the Romantic era is partially due to that era's rediscovery of many lost works of Greek and Roman art from the classical period. The excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum, beginning in 1748, and the slow rediscovery of the "Domus Aurea" (Golden House) of the emperor Nero in Rome (ongoing since the Renaissance, but in the Romantic period...