Poetry and Painting – The Art of Ekphrasis

“For most poets, paintings are primal, as real as the bread and wine on the table, as urgent as a dying parent or concealed lover in the next room.”

J. D. Maclatchy, Poets on Painters

“The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.  There is the same interchange between these two worlds that there is between one art and another, migratory passings to and fro, quickenings, Promethean liberations and discoveries.”

Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel

We are pleased to present a four-part series of discussions exploring the rich tradition of ekphrasis: the prose or poetic responses to visual art that allow the reader to experience the power of the image even in its absence.

Although most modern audiences associate ekphrasis with poems or prose about paintings, sculpture, or other works of art, the meaning of the term (not coined until the 1^st century BCE) has had a rich and varied history since its appearance in classical antiquity, the first and most famous instance that of Homer’s lines on Hephaestos making Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of The Iliad (8^th century BCE).  Originally, ekphrasis was a verbal description of something – almost anything – in life or art. 

“Ekphrasis” derives from the Greek ek=out and phrazei=to speak, thus “to speak out” or “to show in full”.  Classical rhetoricians esteemed beyond all other attributes the qualities of vividness, clarity and intense immediacy (what they termed enargeia) that make a scene of description feel visually present to the audience—as if they are seeing it with their own eyes. 

Language is meant to penetrate the listener’s emotions, dazzling, captivating and thus influencing them.  The listener is “arrested” by the image, is drawn out of time (or the temporal sequence of a narrative) to contemplate in spatial terms that which is actually “not here”.  The ekphrasis has a psychological function, uniting artist, spectator/poet and listener, transforming the latter into a viewing subject. 

Through close readings of poems, lively and engaging art history lectures accompanied by beautiful slides and stimulating group discussions, we will follow the evolution of ekphrasis as a concept and an artistic practice through the Renaissance, Romanticism and Modernism.

Session 1: Titian and the Recovery of Ekphrasis – Ovid and Philostratus
Our journey begins with Titian’s mythological paintings, many of which draw directly on classical ekphrastic sources such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Philostratus’s Imagines. We will look more closely at the manner in which the Venetian artist responded to the intensely visual writing of these authors in creating his own versions of painted poetry.  In addition, we will also read and discuss contemporary poetic responses to Titian’s masterpieces.

Session 2: Stone and Silence – The Poetry of Sculpture
This session explores poetic reflections on sculpture; marble and granite meet the poetic imagination – old empires and lost kingdoms come to life.  From Michelangelo’s sonnet to his favourite sculpture, the “Night” for the Medici Chapel, to Keats’ evocative and mournful meditation on the “Grecian Urn” and the lyrical responses of Rilke and James Merrill to archaic statuary, we’ll examine the ways in which these and other writers have translated ideas such as the passing of time and the power of form into lyric insight.

Session 3: Brueghel’s Afterlife – Poets in the Painter’s Wake
Focusing on the influence of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, this session looks at how his highly descriptive, yet mysterious imagery has inspired poets such as W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Seamus Heaney, Richard Foerster, and Wyslawa Szymborska.  In this process we hope to shed additional light on the manner in which this painter invites us to reimagine history, the meaning of the everyday, and the nature of humanity.

Session 4: Facing Medusa – Ekphrasis, Terror, and the Transforming Gaze
The series concludes with an exploration of the figure of the Medusa as a visual subject and poetic symbol in the iconic works of Cellini, Caravaggio, and Rubens.  We will also consider the ways in which poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley, W. S. Merwin, Louise Bogan, Daryl Hine, and Louis MacNeice have interpreted the myth, focusing on themes such as beauty and horror, gender and power. This discussion takes us to the most arresting aspect of ekphrasis: to imagine or confront an image that threatens to undo the beholder.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four 2.5 hour sessions on Zoom led by Aneta Georgievska-Shine and John Allemand
• Sundays: 1, 8, 15 & 22 February 2026, 4.00 – 6:30 pm (UK).
• £250 for ten hour study over four meetings, to include background notes and resources.

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REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.