"It is the act and not the object of perception that matters": MacGreevy's poetry in relation to perception in literary and visual arts

Thomas MacGreevy had close involvement with artists across a broad spectrum of Irish and European Modernist / Avant-Garde practice, and a long involvement with the wider field of visual arts through his work at the National Gallery of Ireland. His poetry engages with visual arts through reference to specific works, both historical and contemporary. He also draws on art and poetry for its possibilities as metaphor, or allusive properties. This chapter refers to these features of MacGreevy’s poetics, and develops from these a consideration of parallels in practice between the poet’s writing and the practice of artists he was familiar with or works he knew well. The chapter considers the poetry less as engaged in ekphrasis, and more concerned with producing a parallel or equivalent experience in the reader. MacGreevy’s work is not recasting or remaking one art form through the modes of another, but seeking to develop a new sensation in the reader that relates to the experience of seeing or being in the presence of the work of art