Time Traveler for ekphrasis The first known use of ekphrasis was in See more words from the same year. Listen to Our Podcast About ekphrasis. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up. Statistics for ekphrasis Look-up Popularity.
Style: MLA. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Test your visual vocabulary with our question challenge! Love words? Need even more definitions? Just between us: it's complicated. It might have once held wine, or it could have served as a funerary urn. Instead of merely describing the urn, Keats speaks directly to the dancing figures:. The figures on the urn seem all the more hopeless because they're frozen on an artifact that is timeless.
However, Keats' controversial lines — "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"— suggest a type of salvation. Beauty visual art is equated with truth. Bruegel also known as Brueghel painted two monkeys chained in a open window. For more than years, the tiny work — no taller than a paperback novel — has stirred speculation.
Why does one monkey gaze out at the sailboats? Why does the other monkey turn away? In " Two Monkeys by Brueghel ," Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska — places the visual images — the monkeys, the sky, the sea — inside a dream. A student struggles over a history exam in a room where the monkeys perch. One monkey appears to be amused by the student's difficulty. The other monkey offers a clue:. By introducing the student's confusion and the surreal exam, Szymborska suggests that the monkeys symbolize the hopelessness of the human condition.
It doesn't matter whether the monkeys gaze out the window or face the room. Either way, they remain enslaved.
Paintings by Pieter Bruegel are the basis for a variety of ekphrastic writing by some of the most noted poets of the modern era. Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus " stimulated famous poems by W.
Auden and William Carlos Williams. John Berryman and countless others responded to Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow ," each poet offering a unique impression of the scene.
English poet U. Ursula Askham Fanthorpe — was known for irony and dark wit. Fanthorpe's ekphrastic poem, "Not My Best Side," draws inspiration from "Saint George and the Dragon," a medieval illustration of a legendary tale. The artist, Paolo Uccello c. However, Fanthorpe invents a speaker who presents a comical and contemporary interpretation of the scene.
Written in free verse, the three long stanzas are a monologue spoken by the damsel in the painting. Her voice is sassy and defiant:. The irreverent monologue seems all the more humorous in the context of Uccello's painting and the ancient tale of male heroism.
American artist Edward Hopper — painted haunting views of lonely urban scenes. Anne Carson — pondered his work in "Hopper: Confessions," a series of nine poems featured in her collection, Men in the Off Hours. Anne Carson's Hopper-inspired poems combine ekphrasis with quotes from the fourth century philosopher St. In "Nighthawks," for example, Carson suggests that the passage of time has created distance between the figures in the diner that Hopper painted.
Carson's poem is a reflective monologue with staggered lines that convey a sense of shifting light and shadows. Augustine's startling quote about the way time shapes our lives. By juxtaposing words from the philosopher with words spoken by characters in the painting, Anne Carson brings a new dimension to Hopper's work.
Shortly after her divorce from fellow artist Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo — painted a surrealistic self-portrait. The painting stirs many questions: Why is Kahlo wearing a lace headdress? One question to ask when considering ekphrasis is this: Does it matter if the reader is familiar with the representation described? How important is it that the reader know that it was, in fact, stolen in ?
Is Youn describing the painting, speaking for the painting, or doing something else? Would someone recognize your poem as ekphrasis? What is the relationship between the speaker of your ekphrasis and the work of art if different? How would you describe the overall theme, problem, or question at the heart of your ekphrasis, and why do you think it was provoked by this particular image?
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