Rebecca:
"
I can't find the word in my dictionaries either, most annoying,
(where's Robin?) but it seems to me that the term as it has
been used here is rather fluid.
"
This may have crossed with my latest posts, but if it's really an issue, I
could OCR the piece in NPEPP. (Though, joking aside, I do think this is
worth buying -- it's currently £30 in the UK and $45 in the US.)
A google search gives 4070 hits, but try:
http://www.courses.rochester.edu/kraus/Ekphrasis.htm
... for a pretty decent unfolding.
Crudely: a description of a painting; extended, a description of any
imagined visual scene.
Most obviously, Auden's Breugel poem.
Come to think on it, Paul the Usher (whom I'm currently glumly in the
process of translating) did a series of poems on lost Byzantine mosaics.
I'd thought of simply ignoring these, but maybe ...
Then (still sticking to the obvious) there's Chaucer in the Knight's Tale --
the smiler with the knife, and that.
(Though my personal favorite is U.A.Fanthorpe on Ucellini's St. George
painting -- "Not My Best Side".)
Whatever else, it's not new.
'Nuff.
The Dictionary Man
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