SOURCE: “The Figure on the Page: Words and Images in Wright Morris's The Home Place,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 93-108.

In the following essay, Hollander discusses the relation of the visual to the verbal in Morris's photo-text The Home Place.

Ecphrastic treatments of photographs in modern literary verse and prose construe their images as invented pictures in themselves as well as confronting their documentary status. Until very recently, most photographs to which poems have been addressed have been portraits, and the text speaks to their subjects as rendered, and perhaps to the occasion of the taking of the picture. Indeed, some recent poetry has paralleled the theoretical writing of the past forty years or so by dealing with fashionable intellectual questions concerning the epistemological and moral status of particular photographs.¹ But for the earlier part of this century, it was left to...