Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The poetics of ekphrasis

1988; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.1988.10436238

1943-2178

John Hollander,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

The earliest ekphrastic poetry describes what doesn't exist, save in the poetry's own fiction. What Jean Hagstrum called the "iconic" poem (he reserved the term "ecphrastic" for a sort of dramatic monologue in which the picture or sculpture is itself made to speak) (1) has a long history which I need hardly recite in detail to this audience. It would inelude the shields of Herakles and of Achilles, so differently represented by Hesiod and Homer; the ivory cup given by the goatherd to the shepherd Thyrsis in Theocritus' first idyll, whose description by the poet involves readings of feelings and intentions in the human figures depicted there even as all ekphrasis — poetic or art-historical — conti nues to do so today; the armor of Aeneas and the paintings in the Temple of Juno, both described with great regard to how Aeneas himself reads those images; the relief seulpture in Dante's Purgatorio, the tapestries and frescoes in Ariosto and Spenser and — in a remarkable scene of reading and misreading — in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece.