The Starry Night: Ekphrastic inheritance and enchainment

This article explores connections between discrete ekphrastic poems that address the same work of visual art: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889). Contemporary poems about this painting continue to proliferate and new works are often influenced by previously published poems on the artwork, elaborating on or modifying content in the previous poems. In such cases, the earlier poems may be understood as part of the new poem’s ekphrastic inheritance. We explore how such poems, when considered together, constitute a form of enchainment, linking related poetic ideas and tropes. In particular, we discuss Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night” (1961), W. D. Snodgrass’s “Van Gogh: ‘The Starry Night’” (1968), Robert Fagles’s “The Starry Night” (1979), William Virgil Davis’s “Starry Night” (2007) and Elizabeth Spires’s “Starry Night” (2017). Various ekphrastic poems about van Gogh’s painting appear to write back to one another and these ekphrastic connections demonstrate that contemporary poetic ekphrases may be a product of multivalent literary influences as well as being direct responses to an artwork. In such cases, poetic ekphrasis moves well beyond James A. W. Heffernan’s often cited definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation”. This article introduces the terms ekphrastic inheritance and enchainment.