Criticism > Poetry > Wilbur, Richard - Kevin L. Jessar (essay date December 1999)

Wilbur, Richard - Kevin L. Jessar (essay date December 1999)

Kevin L. Jessar (essay date December 1999)

SOURCE: Jessar, Kevin L. “Angels by Way of and in the Laundry: Richard Wilbur's Sacramental Ekphrasis.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32, no. 4 (December 1999): 91-110.

[Arguing that Wilbur's career-long preoccupation with locating the relationship between the tangible and intangible leads him to put ekphrasis—the verbal depiction of a visual object—to new uses, the following essay examines the struggle between image and text in six poems.]

Insofar as ekphrasis is usually defined as the verbal depiction of a visual object or artwork it would seem to constitute little more than either an attempt on the part of a poet or writer to exercise his/her descriptive talents or a mode of meta-discourse for exploring the nature of different artforms. Recently, however, and in keeping with a general concern with what is involved in the representation of another—be...

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