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 it person, event, or object—ekphrasis...