Art and Artists: Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)

Art and Artists: Poems is 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 Mus e des Beaux Arts, Homer s immortal account of the forging of the shield of Achilles, and Federico Garc a Lorca s breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dal . 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.