ekphrasis

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a literary or rhetorical description of a visual work of art that seeks to bring the image vividly before the reader's imagination, making the absent artwork present through language; the word derives from the Greek for description, and the tradition extends from Homer's description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad through Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn to contemporary poetry responding to painting and photography; ekphrasis raises fundamental questions about the relationship between the verbal and the visual, the competition between arts for the representation of reality (paragone), and the power and limits of language to capture spatial, chromatic, and formal qualities that exist in a different sensory register