This dissertation argues that the public art museum and its practices of collecting, organizing, and defining cultures at once enabled and constrained the poetic forms and subjects available to American and British poets of a transatlantic long modernist period. I trace these lines of influence particularly as they shape modernist engagements with ekphrasis, the historical genre of poetry that describes, contemplates, or interrogates a visual art object. Drawing on a range of materials and theoretical formations---from archival documents that attest to modernist poets' lived experiences in museums and galleries to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of art and critical scholarship in the field of Museum Studies---I situate modernist ekphrastic poetry in relation to developments in twentieth-century museology and to the revolutionary literary and visual aesthetics of early twentieth-century modernism. This juxtaposition reveals how modern poets revised the conventions of, and recalibrated the expectations for, ekphrastic poetry to evaluate the museum's cultural capital and its then common marginalization of the art and experiences of female subjects, queer subjects, and subjects of color.

Analyzing the ekphrastic poetry of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, Marianne Moore, Siegfried Sassoon, H. D., and Melvin Tolson, "Beyond the Frame" asserts that these poets radically reconstitute the poetics of ekphrasis by locating their poetic speakers within museums and attending to their critical acts of looking at art on display. In the process, their ekphrastic poems convey aesthetic meanings---anti-heteronormative, anti-colonial, and anti-racist---that undermine the museum's exclusionary framings of cultural history. Contributing to recent conversations in the New Modernist Studies on the public institutions that shaped the development of modernism, and in Historical Poetics on the synchronic and culturally contingent nature of poetic genres, I show modernist ekphrasis to be representative of the ways in which the modernist literary field was constituted in unsettled relation to the forms of institutional authority and cultural capital against which it is often defined. "Beyond the Frame" thus offers a new perspective on the intersections among poetic discourse, visual culture, and cultural institutions in modernist poetry, and a context for historicizing turn-of-the-century public art museums through poems written in and about objects in their collections.