Hopper’s Secret

Poets, and writers with a poetic bent, used to wrestle with paintings as routinely as professional athletes now promote sports equipment. Baudelaire applied himself to the paintings of Delacroix, Ruskin to Turner, Rilke to Cezanne. In the 1950s and ‘60s, you could find Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch limbering up with the work of the abstract expressionists. The encounters didn’t always end felicitously. When Baudelaire suggested that the viewer of Delacroix’s canvases step back from them until all he or she could see was an exciting splash of color, the painter bade the poet a cool au revoir. A poetical temperament, to paraphrase Auden, who irrevocably transfigured Brueghel’s “The Fall of Icarus,” has a tyrannical fixity.

Anyone who has read the poet Mark Strand’s meditations on 30 works by the American painter Edward Hopper, first published in 1994 and now reissued, knows what Auden meant. So powerful is Strand’s vision of Hopper that it seems to pour out of Hopper’s own imagination. Of course, this is an illusion, similar to a painting’s illusion of depth. Strand has assimilated Hopper the way Hopper assimilated the American city and the American small town.

A realist painting is the product of a painter ordering the naked world, and a poet ordering a painting’s order is engaged in an idealized seeing. It is the way we might see if we dwelt amid Platonic essences, with the obscurities of everyday appearance stripped away. Looking at Hopper looking at the world, Strand finds an X-ray of universal destiny.

He begins by writing that Hopper’s paintings seem to be “scenes from my own past” and ends by describing the paintings’ ultimate effect: “Our distance from everything grows.” We age, and the world withdraws. Such double motion mirrors what Strand calls the paintings’ “two imperatives ... the one that urges us to continue and the other that compels us to stay,” much as life moves us through new experience toward death while our foreboding of death makes us resist time’s forward motion. These are the first and last things that structure Hopper’s work. Yet Strand sees in Hopper’s paintings a reprieve from the burden of mortality. For Hopper always keeps the picture’s vanishing point off-stage, as if allowing time to unfold without end through space.

Such is Strand’s idiom, so spare and essential and intense that its few false notes of absent-minded superlative--”magical moment”--or solemn rhetoric--”the air is stricken with purity”--sound louder than their muted imperfection. Discovering an isosceles trapezoid--a four-sided figure with two nonparallel sides of equal length--structuring the composition in many of Hopper’s paintings, Strand keeps adjusting the pitch of the words “isosceles” and “trapezoid” until they take on the sound of “isolated” and “trapped.” “Hopper’s paintings,” he writes, “are short, isolated moments of figuration.... Hopper’s people ... are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company....”

Once familiar, the long window that frames the lonely diner in Hopper’s celebrated “Nighthawks” now appears, in the poet’s hands, as a geometric revelation of how beautiful forms produce beautiful meanings. It is like nature confessing a secret. Perhaps this is the way the world will come to us, in unmediated purposefulness, if we look at it hard enough and promise to be good.