Art and Artists Poems

Art and Artists: Poemsis a sumptuous collection of visions in verse-the work of centuries of poets who have used their own art form to illuminate art created by others. A wide variety of visual art forms have inspired great poetry, from painting, sculpture, and photography to tapestry, folk art, and calligraphy. Included here are poems that celebrate Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Claude Monet's Water Lilies, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Here are such well-known poems as John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," Homer's immortal account of the forging of the shield of Achilles, and Federico García Lorca's breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dalí. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cezanne, Anne Sexton about van Gogh, Billy Collins about Hieronymus Bosch, and Kevin Young about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words-or a few very well-chosen ones.

EMILY FRAGOS is an award-winning poet and the editor of our Pocket Poet anthologies The Great Cat, Music's Spell, The Dance, and Letters by Emily Dickinson.

POEMS ABOUT ART AND ARTISTS, edited by Emily Fragos
 
 
ODE TO THE ARTIST
 
“Old Master” Zbigniew Herbert
“Vermeer” Tomas Transtromer
“Musee des Beaux Arts” W. H. Auden
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” John Keats
from “The Slow Song for Mark Rothko” John Taggart
 “Rembrandt” Anna Kamienska
“A Glance at Turner” Stanley Moss
“A Box of Pastels” Ted Kooser
“ Giotto” Rafael Alberti
“Wyeth’s Milk Cans” Richard Wilbur
from “The Horizontal Line” Edward Hirsch
from “Beauty if Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo” Carole Maso
“Urgent Telegram to Jean-Michel Basquiat” Kevin Young
“Velazquez” Rafael Alberti
“The Shield of Achilles” Homer
“To Caravaggio” Mark Doty
“from “Midsummer – Gauguin XIX” Derek Walcott
“Wolf’s Trees” J. D. McClatchy
“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see” Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“The Great Wave: Hokusai” Donald Finkel
“Corot” D. H. Lawrence
“Renoir” Rosanna Warren
from “Ode to Salvador Dali” Federico Garcia Lorca
 
 
THE PAINTINGS
 
“San Sepolcro” Jorie Graham
“The Dance” William Carlos Williams
“On Carpaccio’s Picture, The Dream of St. Ursula” Amy Lowell
“Musee des Beaux Arts Revisited” Billy Collins
“On a Painting by Wang the Clerk of Yen Ling” Su Tung P’o
“A Farm Picture” Walt Whitman
“The Card-Players” Philip Larkin
“Cy Twombley’s Untitle” Javier O. Huerta
from “Midsummer – Watteau XX” Derek Walcott
from “Two de Chiricos” Mark Strand
“Goya’s ‘Two Old People Eating Soup;” Mona Van Duyn
“Degas: The Millinery Shop” Adam Zagajewski
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” Robert Hayden
“The Last Supper” Osip Mandelstam
“O! (Gustav Klimt)” Czeslaw Milosz
“Blue Poles” Inger Christensen
“The Earliest Angels” Miroslav Holub
from “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine” Delmore Schwartz
“For Spring, by Sandro Botticelli” Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“On the Group of Three Angels Before the Tent of Abraham by Rafaelle, in the Vatican” Washington Allston
from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Wallace Stevens
“Wormwood: The Penitents” Ellen Bryant Voigt
“On a Windy Wash Day Morn” Brenda Seabrook
“Max Schmitt in a Single Scull” Richmond Lattimore
“Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge” Jon Stallworthy
“Don’t let that horse” Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“Starry Night” Anne Sexton
“Nude Descending a Staircase” X. J. Kennedy
from “Two Backgrounds” Edith Wharton
“Cezanne’s Ports” Allen Ginsberg
“Matisse’s Dance” Natalie Safir
from “Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer” Ted Kooser
 
 
THE PORTRAIT GALLERY
 
“Vermeer’s Little Girl” Adam Zagajewski
“Lady with an Ermine” Lucie Brock-Broido
“Rembrandt’s Late Self-Portraits” Elizabeth Jennings
“The Cross of Snow” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Witchcraft by a Picture” John Donne
“On the Portrait of a Woman About to be Hanged” Thomas Hardy
“Formerly a Slave” Herman Melville
from “Before the Mirror, Inscribed to J. A. Whistler” Algernon Charles Swinburne
“Three for the Mona Lisa” John Stone
“In An Artist’s Studio” Christina Rossetti
from “Hamlet” William Shakespeare
“My Last Duchess” Robert Browning
“Picture of a 23-Year-Old Painted by His Friend of the Same Age, An Amateur” Constantine P. Cavafy
“Memling’s Sibylle Sambetha” Anne Provoost
from “Lucrece” William Shakespeare
“American Gothic” John Stone
 
 
THE SCULPTURE GARDEN
 
“Archaic Torso of Apollo” Rainer Maria Rilke
“Ozymandia” Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Rodin’s Thinker” Gabriela Mistral
“The Victory of Samothrace” Ruben Dario
“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” John Keats
“The New Colossus” Emma Lazarus
from “Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois” Camille Guthrie
“Reclining Figure” Donald Hall
“A Calder” Karl Shapiro
“Hiram Powers’  Greek Slave” Elizabeth Barrett Browning
from “Michael Angelo, The Dead Christ” Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
“The Moses of Michael Angelo” Robert Browning
“Brancusi’s Golden Bird” Mina Loy
“To the Fragment of a Statue of Hercules” Samuel Rogers
“these children singing in stone” E. E. Cummings
“The Tall Figures of Giacometti” May Swenson
“The Walking Man of Rodin” Carl Sandburg
from “Trilce, Poem XXXVI” Cesar Vallejo
 
 
VARIETIES OF ARTISTRY 
 
“Joseph Cornell's Hotel du Nord”  Charles Simic
from “Stained Glass” Ted Hughes
“Aunt Jennifer's Tigers” Adrienne Rich
“It's Me!” David Harrison
“Pantoum for These Eyes” Kristine O'Connell George
“Sit A While” Siv Cedering
“A Navajo Blanket” May Swenson
“A Colored Print by Shokei” Amy Lowell
“On the Engraver of his Likeness” John Milton
“Antiquary” John Donne
“Hindu Illumination” James Merrill
“The Emperor's Garden” Amy Lowell
from “The Idylls, I” Theocritus
“Body Mask” Kwame Dawes
“The Mask” Rainer Maria Rilke
“On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon” Eavan Boland
“Woman at the Piano” William Jay Smith
“Calligraphy” Amy Lowell
“Pair of Scrolls” Amy Lowell
“The Lady and the Unicorn” May Sarton
“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” Marianne Moore
from “The City of Dreadful Night” James Thomson ("B.V.")
“Roman Fountain Borghese” Rainer Maria Rilke
“The Figure-Head” Herman Melville
“The Stone Garden” May Sarton
“The Carousel in the Park” Eavan Boland


 ARCHITECTURE

“Facing It” Yusef Komunyakaa
“Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge” William Wordsworth
“The Old Bridge at Florence” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
from “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” George Gordon, Lord Byron
from “Westminster Abbey” Matthew Arnold
“Pisa's Leaning Tower” Herman Melville
“Notre Dame” Osip Mandelstam
“To Brooklyn Bridge” Hart Crane
“Hagia Sophia” Osip Mandelstam
“The Parthenon” Herman Melville
from “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” George Gordon, Lord Byron
from “Shah-Jahan” Rabindranath Tagore
from “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage” George Gordon, Lord Byron


PHOTOGRAPHY

“Plate 134, By Thomas Eakins. ‘A cowboy in the West. An unidentified man at the Badger Company Ranch’" David Ferry
“Photograph, my grandsons spinning in their joy” Lucille Clifton
“Machine Dance” Mary Jo Bang
“War Photograph” Kate Daniels
“Something approaches...” Thom Gunn
“Portrait of my Father as a Young Man” Rainer Maria Rilke
“On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” Herman Melville



OUTSIDER ART

from “Girls on the Run” John Ashbery
“Art Brut” Emily Fragos
“Girl Thinking” Elizabeth Spires
“Figure With Hat” Emily Fragos
“Don't silence yourself, No te calles” Jean Valentine


PAINTER AS POET

“Grateful is Sleep” Michelangelo Buonarroti
“On Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying--Typhoon Coming On” J.M.W. Turner
“On London” J.M.W. Turner
“Body's Beauty” Dante Gabriel Rossetti
“Holy Thursday” William Blake
“The Tyger” William Blake


AT THE MUSEUM

“Museum “ Robert Hass
“On Going Back To The Street After Viewing An Art Show” Charles Bukowski
“In The Museum” Rita Dove
“Stealing The Scream” Monica Youn
“Museum Piece” Richard Wilbur
“The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest” Ryszard Krynicki
“Metropolitan Museum” Langston Hughes