Bruce M. King addresses ekphrasis’s mythic origins with the Shield of Achilles, which illustrates a world beyond the war in which the heroes who populate the Iliad will be obsolete, a confusion summed up in Achilles’s wordless scream on the battlefield after the loss of Patroklos.

Emily Singeisen contextualizes AI, a technologically novel way of exploiting language, within some very old fantasies.

Prompted by a rhetorical study guide question, “Is the urn’s slenderness and round opening attractive?”, Andrew McInnes has his own question about lyric voice and unfulfilled desire: “Does Keats want to fuck the urn?”