SOURCE: “`Fantastiquant Mille Monstres Bossus': Poetic Incongruities, Poetic Epiphanies, and the Writerly Semiosis of Pierre de Ronsard,” in Romanic Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, March, 1993, pp. 143-62.

In the following essay, Nash considers Ronsard's poetics of “seeing and showing” what is imagined and ineffable, as opposed to that of which is simply real.

In his latest study on an intriguing subject that was for him both “exhilarating” and “exasperating,” Murray Krieger defines ekphrasis in these terms: “the literary representation of visual art, real or imaginary.” The kind of ekphrasis that deals with the “real” is of course the art of mimesis, what Krieger calls “enargeia I,” that is, the “sensible” or sense-oriented perception and portrayal of the mimetic real. Ekphrasis which strives to capture the “imaginary,” a writer's art of semiosis, Krieger discusses as “enargeia II,” that is, the “intelligible” or mind-oriented perception and portrayal of the semiotic imaginary.¹ My...