The Significance of Ekphrasis in the Select Works of Mark Doty

Abstract

Ekphrasis in literature has a longstanding experience and huge potential because of the image's simple nature of keeping before us a concept we have not fully realized. Mark Doty is an iconic figure of an era in which artists were driven to reevaluate abstract forms of modernism due to the same societal challenges including political unrest, skepticism about language and the need to see the world in new ways. His interactions with works of art can both inspire and reflect the external shifts they experience. This research article investigates how Mark Doty has utilized the device of ekphrasis to define and reevaluate what is significant to him. Then why should we figure out the writings of Mark Doty as significant to this discussion? Simply put, he shows how poet in the United States around the end of twentieth century dealt with the concept of representation in quite different ways. The determination to verbally portraying visual images has serves a significant role in the evolution of each of his literary styles, even though he begins at distinct position on the line from abstraction to realism and arrived at different places through different ways. He also demonstrates a radical departure from the modernist abstraction that informed much of the forms’ origin, towards a realism that incorporates the recognition that everything is abstract and the belief that any representation is an illusion. This research paper also focuses on how the poems of Mark Doty fit into the term called ‘ekphrasis’ i.e., it shows the relationship between art and literature. The research follows ‘Poetic Analysis’ of Mike Allen as a methodology in which he says that poetic analysis is a form of qualitative study that is both aesthetic and creative.