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Brancusi And His Poets, Joshua S. Mostow

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines four poems on the work of the modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi, written between 1922 and 1966 by four different poets: Carl Sandburg, Mina Loy, Jean (Hans) Arp, and Jiri Kolar. The purpose of the article is to explore how the varying poetics of these writers—the modernism of the Chicago Renaissance, Futurism, Dadaism, and Concrete poetry—influenced the poets' reception and interpretation of the sculptor and his work. This study approaches the relations between visual and verbal art through a semiotic methodology, and while the discussion of the poems takes the form of comparative literature, the main concern of …