Ekphrasis

Abstract

Ekphrasis is a rhetorical figure indicating the verbal representation of a visual object. Understood in its broadest sense, it can refer to any description of a person, place, or thing, but most commonly ekphrasis denotes specifically literary descriptions of visual art. The seminal instance of ekphrasis in Western literature may be Homer's description of Achilles’ shield in The Iliad; celebrated Romantic examples include Keats's ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’, and Wordsworth's ‘Elegiac Stanzas on a Picture of Peek Castle’. Before Romanticism, ekphrastic passages typically figured as digressions from a narrative; ekphrasis was a still frame, a pause, halting the forward momentum of a story. With the Romantics, the ekphrastic poem becomes a self‐standing aesthetic artefact (Heffernan 1993).