Art and Artists

Painting and sculpture have inspired great poetry, but so also have photography, calligraphy, tapestry and folk art. Included here are poems celebrating Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa , Monet’s Waterlilies and Grant Wood’s American Gothic ; well-known poems such as Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn and Auden’s Musee de Beaux-Arts , Homer’s immortal account of the forging of the Shield of Achilles and Garcia Lorca’s breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dali. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cezanne, E. E. Cummings about Picasso, Billy Collins about Hieronymous Bosch, and Joyce Carol Oates about Edward Hopper. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words - or a few very well-chosen ones.