Aesthetic critics and writers of the 18th century grappled with a number of questions concerning beauty, nature, mimesis, art and the sublime and how they all relate to each other. One of these questions concerned mind and matter – that is, whether beauty is a property of the object itself or a projection of the viewer. This seems to be a question that Eliot poses in separating the two potential sources of beauty, suggesting, by "let us […] also", that beauty is found both in the "formed" object and in the "sympathy human” and should be treated with the same respect and appreciation. However, this linguistic separation reveals a kind of frustrating estrangement between the subject and the observed object, something perhaps encompassed in the sublime poetry of the Romantics, in which grandeur is beyond the reach and full apprehension of the poet. However, it is ekphrasis, a form clearly described by Gotthold Lessing as a "verbal description of a visual artifact" that strives to bridge perceived "gaps" between subject and object, while the poet attempts to make one's words achieve an affinity with the visual object described; merging the “divine beauty of form” and human perception, judgment, or “sympathy” toward or toward it. As James AW Hefferman suggests, "Ekphrastic poetry transforms the work of art into a story that expresses the spirit of the speaker", in effect emphasizing the fusion of spirit and matter, while illuminating importantly the fatal flaws of the purpose of the ekphrastic poem. The visual object can never be described in a completely "pure", non-objective way, by words, which are both naturally charged with the poet's opinions and which also exist in "time", as Lessing explains, whereas art exists in “time”. 'space.' What thus appears in the canonical ekphrastic poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats is a strong sense of frustration that the meaning or visual presence of the object can never be quite understood or achieved through their words. However, it is in the nature of this obstruction, where the poems oscillate between proximity to the object and the frustration of not being able to fully reach it, that a new "form" is produced and brought to life by the poem. The result is a revision which replaces the original object, born both from the beauty of the form and the judgment of the viewer. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay One of the main tensions manifest in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Leonardo Da Vinci's "On the Medusa in Shelley Gallery's Florentine," and "Elegaic Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Wordsworth’s “Castle, In a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont” is the one between stasis and movement. In Keats's "Ode" in particular, there is intense frustration with the inert nature of the urn: Thou ever unbroken bride of tranquility,/Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time[. ]The sibilance of "still", "silence" and "slow time" are indicative of a tonal anger at the urn's apparent reluctance to cede anything to Keats, whose desire is to "delight" l urn and reveal its secrets and mysteries. It is a frustration of the visual object; it has no other language than the image, and the words therefore conflict when trying to describe them. Shelley has a similar problem in her depiction of Leonardo da Vinci's Medusa, which is doubly indolent, in that it is still a piece in itself, but also representative of a figure thatturned anyone who looked at her into stone: on her lips and eyelids seems to rest / Beauty like a shadow, from which shine, / Ardent and sinister, struggling beneath, / The anxieties of anguish and death.'The The statue's animations here are vague, as Shelley only sees 'seems' to be, and the 'agonies' he perceives a 'struggle beneath' what he sees as a only partially penetrable layer of indifferent immobility. For Keats and Shelley, these works of art are certainly beautiful in their forms, but their poems suggest that their stillness somehow hinders this beauty. For example, Keat's choice of "the foster child of silence and slow time" carries connotations of illegality and bad placement, as if the urn had become the child of silence and slow time while it was never meant to be. On this subject, Frederick Burwick suggests that "although [Keats] deliberately insists on [the urn's] stasis as a necessary condition for its permanence as art, the poet nevertheless posits the very temporal movement which he purports to deny ". Indeed, Keats asks frantic questions about the inaccessibility of the urn, but in doing so he creates dynamism and movement in the object he is trying to represent: what men or gods are there ? What young girls hate/What crazy pursuit? What struggle to escape?/What flutes and tambourines? What wild ecstasy? [8-10] Keats diexically refers to the urn as "there", and despite his assertion that it is silent and unyielding, the image he presents is one of a "mad pursuit", of a “escape” and an “ecstasy”. '. Similarly, in Shelley's “Medusa,” the seemingly reclining figure with a fixed gaze has actively growing hair as Shelley describes it: And from his head as of one body grows,/Like […] grass from a watery rock,/Hairs that are viperous, and they wind and flow/And their long entanglements one in another,/And with endless involutions show/Their brilliance in mail [17-21]The “Growth” here occurs in the present, as the hair “twists and flows” then “locks” into tangles. The image here of grass growing on a "watery rock" also seems particularly illuminating in the broader sense of the ekphrastic methods of Shelley and Keats. Both perceive a solid, visual image and capture it in words by labeling in their titles the object on which they focus, natural linguistic signs, “urn”, “jellyfish”, which point directly to the object. As Murray Krieger indicates in his writings on ekphrastic poetry, it is "the romantic quest to realize the nostalgic dream of an original, pre-fallen language of bodily presence", a language which "despite its limitations , [can] rediscover the immediacy of blind vision integrated into our habit of perceptual desire since Plato. Both authors, however, find this quest nearly impossible, and although they can partially conjure up the visual artifact, they find themselves forced to grow and expand outward from the solid artifact-like a “rock”. Their failure to present the visual artifact with spatial immediacy in words creates a new temporal and dynamic image, which, according to David Kennedy, "begs to be judged and evaluated as a work of art in its own right." In "Peele Castle", the struggle between stasis and movement is reversed, but the principle of creating a new artifact remains the same. To Wordsworth, Beaumont's depiction of the castle seems entirely wrong – Wordsworth knew it as a place surrounded by "calm" and "tranquility", but perceives in the painting "a flash of lightning, [...] a violent wind and waves..