What "ekphrasis" means in literature

A term you'll meet in rhetoric and poetry.

Ekphrasis (Greek ekphrasis, "out- speaking" or "description") is a literary description of a visual work of art — a poem about a painting, a passage about a sculpture, a prose meditation on a photograph. The form is one of the oldest in Western literature, present at the beginning (Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad) and still active today. To read it well is to understand that the literary text is doing something the visual image could not: not just describing the artwork, but staging a relationship between two media.

The original: Homer's shield

The foundational ekphrasis in Western literature is the description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad Book 18 — about 130 lines depicting the scenes Hephaestus engraves on the shield Achilles will carry into his final battles. The shield depicts an entire cosmos in miniature: the heavens and the stars; two cities at peace and at war; agriculture; a wedding; a murder trial; a vineyard; cattle and sheep; a dance; the river Ocean encircling the whole.

The passage establishes the form's basic features. The artwork (real or imagined) is described in detail; the description does not stop at the surface but enters the depicted scenes as if they were narratives in themselves; the reader is asked to hold both the artwork's stillness and the narrative's motion at once. The shield is the world inside the poem inside the world.

Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

The most famous ekphrastic poem in English is John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819). The poem addresses an ancient Greek urn — possibly a real urn Keats had seen, possibly imagined — covered with scenes of lovers, musicians, sacrifice, a deserted town. Keats's speaker meditates on the relationship between the urn's frozen depictions and the time-bound human life that produced them.

The famous closing couplet — "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" — is itself ekphrastic: it presents a verbal artefact (the urn's apparent message) that Keats's poem has constructed. The poem is what the urn says only because the poem has put the saying in the urn's mouth. The whole relationship between the verbal and the visual is the poem's deep subject.

The form's distinctive question

Ekphrasis is structurally about what language can do that images cannot, and what images can do that language cannot. Some recurring concerns:

Movement vs. stillness. The visual artwork is frozen; the poem moves. Ekphrasis usually animates the still scene, projecting actions, motives, and consequences the artwork itself can only imply.
Specificity vs. abstraction. The image shows a particular face; the poem can name what the face is doing or why.
Time vs. eternity. The artwork is timeless within its medium; the poem operates in time, ending. Keats's urn will outlast the poem about it.
The viewer's place. Ekphrasis often stages the relationship between viewer and artwork explicitly — making the reader the second-order viewer of a viewing that the poem has performed.

Some major examples

The shield of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid Book 8 — Virgil's deliberate reworking of Homer's shield of Achilles. The Roman shield depicts the future of Rome.
W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938) — a meditation on Bruegel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Auden's poem makes the painting's casual depiction of catastrophe into an argument about how suffering happens off-centre while ordinary life continues.
William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel (1962) — a poetry collection entirely ekphrastic, taking specific paintings as poems' subjects.
John Ashbery, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975) — a long poem responding to Parmigianino's self-portrait. The poem won the Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most extended ekphrastic meditations in American poetry.
Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo" — a sonnet on a fragmentary classical sculpture, ending with the famous "You must change your life," delivered by the artwork to the viewer.

Ekphrasis in prose fiction

Prose fiction uses ekphrasis too, often in moments where a character views a painting or photograph that the novel then describes at length. Henry James was a master of the device — characters in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl view paintings whose ekphrastic description is doing thematic work. Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (2013) is built around an ekphrastic relation to Fabritius's painting; the novel essentially is a meditation on the painting that gives it its title.

Why writers use ekphrasis

Several reasons:

To examine the limits of language. Ekphrasis stages the boundary between media — what words can carry that images cannot, and vice versa.
To compress an entire world. Like the shield of Achilles, an ekphrastic passage can hold a whole cosmos in a small space.
To stage seeing. Ekphrasis is partly about the act of viewing — the speaker's relationship to the artwork is the poem's drama.
To invoke an existing audience. A poem about a famous painting brings the painting's audience to the poem.

How to read it in context

When a poem or passage describes a painting, sculpture, or photograph at length, ask three questions. First, what is the actual visual artwork (if it exists)? Second, what does the poem's description add that the artwork itself does not contain? Third, why has the writer chosen this artwork? The ekphrastic relationship is rarely accidental; the writer is making an argument about what their medium can do that the visual medium cannot.

Try Lexio

Look up any word like this — in any book, in any browser.

Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.

Try Lexio — free →