Ekphrasis in Literature: Writing About Art
A detailed guide to ekphrasis — writing about visual art, Keats, Auden, Homer, and close reading methods.
What happens when a writer tries to describe a painting, a sculpture, a photograph? The writer is translating one medium into another — visual into verbal, spatial into temporal, image into language. This act of translation is called ekphrasis, and it is one of literature’s most fascinating and paradoxical enterprises.
Ekphrasis is impossible. A poem cannot show you what a painting shows you. A novel cannot make you see what a sculpture makes you see. And yet writers have been attempting ekphrasis for nearly three thousand years — not because they believe they can replicate the visual experience, but because the attempt itself produces something new: a meditation on the relationship between seeing and saying, between image and word, between art and time.
Ekphrasis is the literary description of a work of visual art. The term comes from the Greek ek (out) and phrasis (speech) — literally, “speaking out” or “telling in full.”
Ekphrasis is a literary work that describes, responds to, or interprets a work of visual art, using language to engage with the visual and exploring the relationship between different artistic media.
The earliest and most famous example of ekphrasis is Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad (c. 8th century BCE). The god Hephaestus forges a shield for Achilles, and Homer describes its images in extraordinary detail — cities at war and peace, harvests, dances, the ocean. The description is longer than many complete poems, and it raises the central question of ekphrasis: what can words do that images cannot?
In the Romantic period, ekphrasis became a major poetic mode. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is the greatest English ekphrastic poem. In the twentieth century, Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (both responding to Breughel’s painting) extended the tradition.
1. The Impossible Task
Ekphrasis acknowledges its own impossibility. The writer cannot replicate the visual experience in language. But the attempt to do so produces its own kind of meaning — a meditation on the limits of representation.
2. The Relationship Between Media
Ekphrasis explores the differences between visual and verbal art. Images are spatial, immediate, and silent. Words are temporal, sequential, and voiced. The ekphrastic work lives in the gap between these two modes.
3. Interpretation and Response
Ekphrasis is not mere description. The writer interprets, responds to, and sometimes argues with the visual work. Keats’s urn “teaches” him about beauty and truth. Auden’s Breughel reveals something about human suffering.
4. The Stillness of Art vs. the Flow of Time
Visual art is frozen — a moment captured in space. Literature unfolds in time. Ekphrasis often explores this tension: the poem gives voice to the silent image, or the image freezes what the poem describes in motion.
Keats’s ode is addressed to a Grecian urn — a visual artifact that the poet describes, questions, and interprets. The urn is “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” a “foster-child of silence and slow time.” It is beautiful because it is frozen: the lovers on its surface will never kiss, the trees will never lose their leaves.
The poem’s ekphrastic power comes from Keats’s engagement with the urn’s silence. He asks it questions it cannot answer: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” The urn’s silence is not a failure — it is the source of its power. The poem gives voice to the voiceless image, and in doing so, creates a meaning that neither the urn nor the poem could achieve alone.
What is ekphrasis?
The literary description of a work of visual art.
What is the purpose of ekphrasis?
To explore the relationship between visual and verbal art, and to create meaning through the act of translating one medium into another.
Ekphrasis is literature’s way of entering into conversation with the visual arts. It does not try to replace the image with words. It tries to respond to the image — to interpret it, to argue with it, to give it voice, and to be changed by it. In this conversation, both arts are enriched: the visual work gains the temporality and voice of language, and the verbal work gains the immediacy and stillness of the image.