An ekphrastic poem is an act of collaboration. It’s the poet’s reaction to a work of visual art, generally a painting but it could be a statue, photograph, a work in glass, and so forth. Keats’ Shelley’s poem on the image of Medusa once thought to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and UA Fanthorpe’s from Uccello’s St George and the Dragon, are examples of ekphrasis. The ‘collaboration’ is usually achieved without the artist’s knowledge, although Dante Gabriel Rossetti
