Exhibit review: ‘Poetic Likeness’ at the National Portrait Gallery

There is something almost paradoxical about an exhibition devoted to portraits of poets. One imagines poets, of all the creative types, to be the most inward, cartographers of the disembodied landscape, and not given to advertise their material presence in the world. Is there a poet who hasn’t written on this basic dualism?

But the National Portrait Gallery’s engaging exhibition “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets” presents the great American poets of the past century in the flesh, recalling an era, perhaps irretrievably lost, when poets had an audience, rose on occasion to the status of celebrity and were considered essential props at major public affairs. The pleasure of the show is its critical edge, its focus on serious poetry during a specific period of time — from the form-shattering genius of Walt Whitman to the culture-shattering crisis of Vietnam. Curated by David Ward, whose last major show (with Jonathan Katz) was the critically acclaimed exhibition of gay and lesbian portraiture “Hide/Seek,” “Poetic Likeness” feels idiosyncratic yet canonical, a subjective but deeply considered attempt to define a pantheon of worthy poets, without regard for the trivialities of fame or reputation.

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The focus on Whitman and Ezra Pound as the progenitors of a 20th-century tradition means that many famous poets are not included. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who doesn’t entirely deserve the critical oblivion into which he has fallen, was too backward looking, too much interested in singing “the little songs of the masses” (to borrow Whitman’s assessment), to be part of the show. And more recent celebrity poets such as Maya Angelou, who recited at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration, aren’t included either, falling outside Ward’s self-imposed cutoff in the mid-1970s, a cultural moment defined as much by the death of poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell as by poetry’s turn to a more confessional and often politicized voice.

“I couldn’t do a survey of all American poetry,” Ward says — it would be too large to manage. The exhibition also draws almost entirely on the National Portrait Gallery’s own collection, making it impossible to take an encyclopedic approach. Ward readily acknowledges the many lacunas.

And even inclusion in the exhibition doesn’t mean endorsement. Ward’s wall texts are deliciously indulgent, filled with subjective responses and critical assessments.

“Sandburg’s writing and his public persona suffer from an excess of ingenuous sincerity,” Ward writes of Carl Sandburg, a good poet but vastly overshadowed by the greater talent of Robert Frost.

“I expect to hear from the Sandburg fan club,” Ward says.

E.E. Cummings is dealt with fairly and charitably. “Edward Estlin Cummings is particularly attractive to people discovering poetry for the first time,” Ward writes, but Cummings’s apparent rule-breaking, the free-form punctuation and grammar, is only superficial and “begins to pall with repetition.”

“The remarkable thing about Gertrude Stein is that she is one of the most influential literary modernists, yet no one reads her anymore,” Ward writes of the famous-for-being-famous self-promoter. Near a 1931 George Platt Lynes photograph of Stein is a snippet of her typically infantile doggerel: “Very fine is my valentine./Very fine and very mine./Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.”