10 The Ekphrasis: History and Form
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
The Ekphrasis
Eking out possibility and meaning - Searching to the core and connecting - the word and the image - two - merged into one - the ekphrasis.
The Exphrasis: The History and the Form
The word “ekphrasis” come from the Greek “ek,” meaning “out of” and “phrazin,” meaning “ to explain.” The ekphrasis is a vivid description. More specifically, it is any genre of writing that describes any type of art or object. First appearing in Greece with Homer’s vivid description of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of his epic poem, “The Iliad.” The ekphrasis did not appear in England until the Eighteenth century.
Notable writers of this form are Homer, Percy Shelley, Robert Browning, W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg.
The form of the ekphrasis varies. It can have any number of lines and any number of stanzas. Ekphrastic poems can rhyme or not. And the meter and the refrain are the choice of the writer. In fact, some ekphrastic poetry is in the shape of another style of poem. A notable example of this “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, which is at one an ode and simultaneously, an ekphrastic poem.
Resources
Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost. First, Harper Collins, 2004.
Boland, Eavan, and Mark Strand. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Reprint, W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Fussell (1-Jan-1979) Paperback. Revised, McGraw-Hill Higher Education; Revised edition edition (1 Jan. 1979), 1979.
Questions
What do you know about ekphrastic poetry?
Have you ever read or listened to an ekphrastic poem?
Do you have a favorite exphrasis?
Have you ever written an ekphrasis?
If you were to write an ekphrasis, what art would you like to describe?