Out of Eden: Essays on Modern Art

by W.S. Di Piero

Out of Eden presents the rigorous investigations and musings of a poet-essayist on the ways in which modern artists have confronted and transfigured the realist tradition of representation. Di Piero pursues his theme with an autobiographical force and immediacy. He fixes his attention on painters and photographers as disparate as Cezanne, Boccioni, Pollock, Warhol, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank. There is indeed a satisfying sweep to this Matisse, Giacometti, Morandi, Bacon, the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the late nineteenth century, the Futurists of the early modern period, and the American pop painters.

Di Piero's analysis of modern images also probes the relation between new kinds of image making and transcendence. The author argues that Matisse and Giacometti, for example, continued to exercise the religious imagination even in a desacralized age. And because Di Piero believes that the visual arts and poetry live intimate, coordinate lives, his essays speak of the relation of poetry to forms in art.

Genres: Art

Paperback

First published June 13, 1991

About the author

William Simone Di Piero was born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and earned degrees from St. Joseph’s College and San Francisco State College. A poet, essayist, art critic, and translator, Di Piero has taught at institutions such as Northwestern University, Louisiana State University, and Stanford, where he is professor emeritus of English and on faculty in the prestigious Stegner Poetry Workshop. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, Di Piero was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2012.

Di Piero’s poetry is known for its gritty realism. Populated with characters and settings reminiscent of the South Philadelphia neighborhood of his boyhood and the Italian-American working-class families he grew up with, Di Piero’s poetry frequently makes use of colloquial language and diction.

An award-winning translator of Italian poetry, Di Piero’s first translation, Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri, was nominated for a National Book Award. Other translations include Sandro Penna's This Strange Joy, which received the Academy of American Poets Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, Leonardo Sinisgalli's The Ellipse (1982) and Night of Shooting Stars (2011), and a translation of Euripides’s Ion.

W.S. Di Piero has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He lives in San Francisco.