A Few Words about Ekphrastic Poetry

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I am a visual person, and draw much of my poetic inspiration from the natural world around me. I also enjoy writing poems about what I perceive as the essence and/or form in works of art such as photographs and paintings.

Writers have long referred to images, whether two- or three-dimensional, in their poems. You may well be familiar with some of the more famous paintings based on these images. You might care to look at Allen Ginsberg's poetic treatment of an oil painting of the fishing village of L'Estaque, known as Cézanne's Ports, which you can find here (click on the painting to see the detail).

The word 'ekphrasis' comes from two Greek words meaning to speak out, and was employed as a means of teaching rhetoric. Ekphrastic poems engage with, speak out about, or or give voice to a piece of art. They embody the intersection of the verbal and visual elements in a way that offer not merely a detailed desription of the object in question but also invite or evoke some kind of emotional response.


Some of you may be familiar with Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad Book Eighteen: perhaps you visited the Troy exhibition at the British Museum last autumn and saw the shield installation by Spencer Finch (click here and scroll down). The portrayal in nine depictions of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad is an early instance of ekphrasis.