Fugitive Pieces: F.T. Prince and Sculpture

Abstract

This chapter explores a neglected aspect of mid-twentieth-century poetry: the creative and economic interplay between architecture, language, and form. It takes as a focal point the work of a lesser-known poet, F.T. Prince, making use of underexplored material in his archive. Such poetry calls for closer critical attention to the re-fashioning of material across disciplines. For instance, the ‘delightful voids ‘ and ‘long fractures’ of Prince’s work oscillate between word and sculptural matter, creating ‘fugitive’ pieces that are at once verbally and spatially coercive. It offers a case in which twentieth-century poetry, through the architecture of the page, subtly and insistently reminds readers of the politics and economics of its production as commissioned word and work. Bringing to light material from the new Prince archive, this chapter examines the author’s skilful negotiations of the processes of artistic dissemination and patronage, as well as his intimate relationship with the politics of commission and production across historical time. It reads early modern and twentieth-century buildings – in print and in place – not as neutral structures, but as forms of argument that persuade and coerce, in their inhabitability. It argues for closer attention in current poetic criticism to the materiality of the work, which foregrounds its fraught aesthetic and economic self-interest. Prince’s poetry, in reaching back to cinquecento sculpture and artwork, insists that its readers recognise that the artist’s skill in physical rendering – in the praise-poem, the commemorative object, the structure built or work painted to ‘your’ honour – is required in order successfully to negotiate a commissioner’s and an audience’s, as well as its own agendas.