Contemporary Poetry about Painting

Abstract

Teachers of contemporary literature should enjoy the advantages of ekphrastic poetry-poetry written in response to, or interpreting, paintings or other works of art. Ekphrasis in literature has a well-established rhetorical tradition, going all the way back to Homer's description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad and as the dominant poetic approach in English classics such as John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.