Comparisons between the visual and verbal arts and the barrier between poetry and painting have long been a source of theoretical debate and have generated a large body of critical discussion. It is believed that the discussions about ekphrasis do not lay sufficient emphasis on the poet-reader/viewer/spectator, and the reader of the poem as a spectator or the ekphrasic spectator. Most writers frequently overlook the role of modern critical theories like Reader response and Spectator response in the analyses of ekphrastic poems. The spectator is either clubbed with the reader with a slanting bar (reader/spectator) implying no difference between the two or is assigned a passive role compared with the reader's. The reader of an ekphrasic poem is also a spectator. Being a spectator involves reading poems, which, in fact, are reading paintings or sculptures. In this context, the reader is therefore different from an ordinary reader, for he is both a reader and a spectator. The inter-art text within the text, studied from this angle, unfolds the plurality of meaning as well as different aspects of culture, race, gender and so on. This paper examines the poems written on one art object, The Mona Lisa, the western icon of art and beauty. The poems chosen are those of Yeats, Angelina Weld Grimke and John Stone.

Intertextual studies involving visual and verbal arts have long been a source of theoretical debate and have engendered a particularly large body of critical commentary. Language, a temporal medium, and its capacity to portray spatial dimensions have become an important locus of attention in contemporary critical discourse. In other words, ekphrasis, or the verbal representation of visual representation (Mitchell quotes Heffernan in his book, Picture Theory, 151) introduces a host of difficult analytical implications, which led to several interesting theoretical perspectives. A reading of the works of theorists like W J T Mitchell, Wendy Steiner, Murray Krieger, James Heffernan, and John Hollander provides a sense of the current state and surprising complexity of this much-contended controversy between the visual and verbal representations. The studies of these critics attempt to articulate new ways or interpretive tools for unlocking the affinities between poetry and sculptor or painting.

The Smile that Launched a Thousand Lines: The Mona Lisa and the Poetics of Ekphrasis, english studdies,articals,materials ,poems, monalisa, visual and verbal arts, poetry and painting, theoretical debate, and poet-reader/viewer/spectator, reader of the poem, spectator or the ekphrasic spectator.