Ekphrasis is one of the oldest and most enduring techniques in literature, stretching from Homer’s Iliad all the way to Ocean Vuong and Claudia Rankine. At its core, ekphrasis is the act of using words to describe a work of art—painting, sculpture, architecture, even music or film—in such vivid detail that the artwork comes alive again in language. It is writing that looks, studies, feels, and transforms.
For thousands of years poets have turned to ekphrasis not simply to describe an artwork, but to think through it—to make the artwork a mirror for human experience. And today, writers continue to use ekphrasis to explore identity, memory, justice, beauty, grief, and joy.
1. Where Ekphrasis Comes From
2. Homer: The Shield of Achilles
3. Vergil: The Shield of Aeneas
4. Sappho and Lyric Sensuality
5. Renaissance and Early Modern Ekphrasis
6. Romantic Ekphrasis: Keats and the Eternal Urn
7. Modern Ekphrasis: Auden, Williams, and Moore
8. Contemporary Ekphrasis: From Rita Dove to Ocean Vuong
9. Why Writers Still Use Ekphrasis Today
10. How to Write Ekphrastic Poetry Yourself
11. Frequently Asked Questions
12. References
The word “ekphrasis” comes from ancient Greek: ek (out) + phrazein (to speak). To “speak out” something—to make it vivid, to draw it forth into presence.
In antiquity, an ekphrasis was any literary passage that brought an object, place, or artwork fully before the mind’s eye. Rhetoricians taught it as a skill: the ability to make readers see. It was never merely description; it was showing through language.
One of the earliest and most famous examples of ekphrasis appears in Book 18 of Homer’s Iliad, where the god Hephaestus forges a new shield for Achilles. Homer does not simply describe metal; he creates a miniature world.
Homer shows villages, vineyards, herdsmen, a wedding, a trial, dancers in a circle—life itself hammered onto bronze. The shield becomes a vision of what Achilles cannot have: peace, community, the rhythms of ordinary life.
This is what ekphrasis often does: it reveals the emotional life of the viewer more than the artwork itself.
Vergil, writing centuries later, rewrites Homer’s ekphrasis with Roman ambition. In Aeneid Book 8, the god Vulcan crafts a shield for Aeneas that depicts the entire future of Rome—Augustus, Actium, triumphs, rituals, the long march of empire.
Vergil’s ekphrasis teaches a powerful truth: sometimes the artwork shows not what has been but what will be. Ekphrasis becomes prophecy.
Though Sappho does not offer a formal ekphrasis like Homer or Vergil, fragments such as the famous “Anactoria” poem describe human beauty with such luminous precision they function ekphrastically: the body becomes sculpture; gesture becomes art.
Sappho’s fragments remind us that ekphrasis can be intimate—not about marble or painting but about the human presence as artwork.
During the Renaissance, poets rediscovered classical ekphrasis and made it central to lyric expression. Shakespeare describes tapestries, statues, and portraits; Spenser fills The Faerie Queene with allegorical imagery that functions as emblematic art.
Perhaps the most striking early modern example is in Ben Jonson’s poem “Picture of the Mind,” where an imagined portrait becomes a meditation on emotion and reason.
No discussion of ekphrasis is complete without John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819). Here Keats speaks to the figures painted on the ancient vessel—musicians, lovers, a sacrificial procession—and imagines their frozen lives.
He addresses the urn as a “Sylvan historian,” a storyteller across centuries. The poem’s final lines—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—have launched generations of debate.
Keats shows how ekphrasis allows a poet to interrogate time itself: what lasts, what vanishes, what art preserves.
In the 20th century, ekphrasis takes a modernist turn. W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938) looks at Brueghel’s painting of Icarus falling into the sea. The poem famously observes how “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.”
Auden uses ekphrasis not to praise beauty but to confront indifference—the way suffering happens while the world continues its errands.
Meanwhile, William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” also responds to Brueghel, but with characteristic brevity and starkness, reducing myth to a small splash in a field of ordinary labor.
Marianne Moore, in poems like “No Swan So Fine,” responds to objects in museum cases, exploring the strangeness of beauty locked behind glass. Her ekphrasis is intellectual, playful, precise.
Contemporary poets use ekphrasis to explore identity, race, sexuality, power, and trauma. Rita Dove’s “Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove” (from Thomas and Beulah) responds to a carnival photograph, transforming it into a meditation on spectacle, gaze, and human dignity.
Ocean Vuong’s “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” uses a photograph as its catalyst, blending visual art with memory, queerness, and the wounds of history.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen integrates visual artwork throughout, using ekphrasis as a method of social critique.
Contemporary ekphrasis is not passive description. It is active interpretation, reframing the artwork to investigate the world we live in.
Writers keep returning to ekphrasis because:
If you want to write your own ekphrastic poem, try this simple process:
Ekphrasis works best when the poet lets the artwork transform something inside them.
What does “ekphrasis” literally mean?
It comes from Greek, meaning “to speak out” or “to describe vividly.”
Does ekphrasis have to be about visual art?
No. Many modern poets use music, film, or photography as ekphrastic catalysts.
Can fiction be ekphrastic?
Absolutely. Novelists often use paintings or objects to shape characters or themes.
Is ekphrasis more about the art or the writer?
Both—but ekphrasis reveals how the writer sees the art, not just the art itself.
Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
Homer. Iliad, Book 18.
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Moore, Marianne. “No Swan So Fine.”
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen.
Sappho. Various fragments.
Vergil. Aeneid, Book 8.
Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah.