Asymptote on Giorgio de Chirico's Poetry

Stefania Heim discusses her translation of Giorgio de Chirico's Geometry of Shadows (A Public Space Books, October), the first comprehensive and bilingual collection of de Chirico's Italian poetry. "Sun-scorched piazza, marble torso, rubber glove, arched arcade tossing shadows, smoke puffing from a background train: the landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico’s imagination have become iconic," she writes. "The uncanny emotive power of de Chirico’s visual compositions has gotten him called a poet, even a great poet." Picking up from there: 

“He could condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association,” writes art critic Robert Hughes about the painter’s canvases, marveling that, “[o]ne can try to dissect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.” Metaphor, juxtaposition, unsettling connections, meaning evoked in the missing connective tissue between somehow familiar objects—these are a poet’s tools. De Chirico cultivated this association. He addresses the two “goddesses:” “true Poetry” and “true Painting.” With allusion, symbols, and mythmaking, he connects his work to the great striving of the ages.

The idea of the poet crops up again and again in de Chirico’s painting titles: “The Uncertainty of the Poet,” “Delights of the Poet,” “The Nostalgia of the Poet.” In every case the poet appears as a vessel for feeling’s vicissitudes and registration. Two paintings are purportedly portraits of de Chirico’s friend and early supporter, Guillaume Apollinaire, but for the most part the perspective of these canvases zooms out. If a represented figure, the poet is a mannequin, a bust, or a tiny, silhouetted shape walking across the immense still heat of the frame. More often, I think “poet,” for de Chirico, refers to the mind that views and composes.

De Chirico didn’t only paint about poets; he risked the title for himself...

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