ABSTRACT
Ekphrastic poetry – that is, poetry inspired by visual artworks – often rests on the unspoken assumption that visual and verbal art are, if not interchangeable, at least compatible. The premise of this chapter is that the use of ekphrasis in poetry often reveals the limitations of this foundational analogy, thereby confirming a distinction established in the eighteenth century in G.E. Lessing’s seminal essay “Laokoӧn”. My examples, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror”, illustrate that the visual arts and poetry are discrete aesthetic forms relying on fundamentally different representational procedures, the former representing objects, the other actions.
