The Sculpted Word not only provides the fullest treatment yet of Keats's use of ekphrasis - a trope by which writer translate visual compositions into words - but also places the poems within their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. Grant F. Scott observes that in Keats we often feel that we are wandering through a museum with a particularly eloquent and subtle guide.

On one level, the guide's efforts to capture such visual images as engraved gems, landscape paintings, marbles, and urns represent an attempt to defeat the dominion of the image by writing it into language.

On a deeper level, Scott suggests, ekphrasis presents Keats with psychological issues that have less to do with aesthetics than anxieties over such issues as cultural heritage, poetic tradition, and gender identity. "Everywhere in ekphrasis studies," he argues, "we encounter the language of subterfuge, of conspiracy; there is something taboo about moving across media, even as there is something profoundly liberating."