Victorian Statumania: Poets and Public Monuments with Dr Jack Quin

This paper will examine a period of prolific monument-making in the late-nineteenth century, and the poetry written in response to the tempestuous debates surrounding public statues. Poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lionel Johnson and others conceive of sculpture as a curiously fluid medium that is non-static, precarious, and subject to ageing or material degrading. Ekphrastic poems of the 1880s-90s can be seen to frustrate a seamless verisimilitude of man and monument, while other political poems blur the distinction between idolatry and iconoclasm in a period of 'statumania'.

Jack Quin is an Assistant Professor in the School of English at Dublin City University. Before joining DCU he was a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of W.B. Yeats and the Language of Sculpture (OUP, 2022) as well as numerous articles on the relationship between modern literature and visual culture.

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