Engaged as I am at the moment in writing a poem based on a painting, I found this essay by Alfred Corn on ekphrasis especially interesting. The challenge, it seems to me, is how to describe while moving beyond description to convey the emotional/intellectual content encoded in the forms. Unlike writing about the landscape out one’s window, for example, ekphrasis has to acknowledge that such content exists, and one feels an obligation to it that writing about Nature doesn’t involve — at least for poets like me, who dissent from Baudelaire when he writes in “Correspondences” that “Nature is a temple whose living colonnades / Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs; / Man wanders among symbols….” My guess is that Baudelaire received his true inspiration for this one at the Salon. In fact, if he’d only specified the painting, we might recognize “Correspondences” as a masterly ekphrastic poem.