Janice Hewlett Koelb. The Poetics of Description: Imagined Places in European Literature (Book Review‪)‬

Janice Hewlett Koelb. The Poetics of Description: Imagined Places in European Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 20o6. Pp. xii+232. $75.00. Ekphrasis, as we all know, is the literary description of works of art. John Hollander has anthologized it, James Heffernan has written its history, Michael C. J. Putnam and Grant Scott have demonstrated its centrality to the poetry of Virgil and Keats. Poetic ekphrasis began with the shield of Achilles and the beechen bowl of Theocritus, flowered in high modernism, and remains a favorite of post-modern poets and theorists alike. For what could be more self-consciously self-referential than an ekphrastic poem? There is, in short, a finn critical consensus about the nature and practice of ekphrasis: like many a Supreme Court decision, it is settled law.