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Poems About Sculpture

Foreword by Robert Pinsky
Edited by Murray Dewart
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Hardcover
$14.95 US
4.4"W x 6.5"H x 0.7"D   | 8 oz | 24 per carton
On sale Sep 06, 2016 | 256 Pages | 9781101907757
Poems About Sculpture is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form.

Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers of all kinds.
FOREWORD
 
This book is a good idea, executed with verve: by joining two arts, it invites fresh consideration of art itself. What has an art made of breath to do with an art made of matter? These lines by William Shakespeare suggest an answer, by concentrating on Time:
 
O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
(Sonnet 65)
 
Time registers movement as well as decay, sweetness as well as battering. In the dimension of time the unfolding vocal breath of a poem transpires; and also in the dimension of time the presence of a sculpture can appear in the round.
 
Variety rules here. Murray Dewart’s choices range beyond any duality of rock and steel on one side, ‘‘honey breath’’ on the other. Rhythms of confirmation and surprise, classic expectation and eccentric surprise, enliven this variously populated book. The context of sculpture gives a renewed sense to Yeats’s audacious vision of his soul’s embodiment in “Sailing to Byzantium”:
 
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
 
He not only imagines himself inhabiting an artifact, but also the vision is made the more peculiar by the object’s nature: small, ornamental, mechanical rather than natural. The bird, a piece of representational, kinetic sculpture, is also expressive. In the concluding line, the imagined work of art encompasses a sweeping, possibly enduring vision of past, present and future: Time comprehended.
 
By contrast, Sharon Olds’s “The Urn” offers a different account of an artifact – personal rather than heroic, actual rather than visionary – and is bold in something like an opposite way to “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here the poet alertly considers an actual, contemporary container for funerary ashes:
 
I had thought it would be tapered, with a small
waist and a pair of handles, silver-
plated, like a loving cup
or tennis trophy, but there on the table
was a smooth, square box, with a military
look, the stainless steel corners
soldered up, a container that could bury
radium waste.
 
The object she does not see, but expected, is described in a little more detail than the “smooth, square box” itself. In art, vision engages presence, but is not bound by it. Like Yeats’s bird, Olds’s poem exemplifies what might be called sculptural imagination. Both poems – and Shakespeare’s sonnet 65 too – consider shaped metal (or more precisely, the idea of shaped metal) in relation to death and afterlife.
 
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is an inevitable choice for this book, being possibly the best-known poem in English about a statue. The sonnet indelibly presents the ruined statue’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” separated in the desert sand from the head’s “shatter’d visage” with its “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.” But it is here further illuminated by the inclusion of another poem on that same statue of Ozymandias: Horace Smith’s sonnet written as part of a friendly competition with his friend Shelley in 1818. Smith’s poem is good, and its comic sense – with a singular Leg and its initial capital – sharpens our sense of the sardonic in Shelley’s poem. Smith’s first eight lines make a point similar to Shelley’s, Time’s mockery of boastful grandeur:
 
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws,
The only shadow that the desert knows: –
‘‘I am the great Ozymandias,’’ saith the stone.
‘‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand. – The City’s gone, –
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
 
But Smith’s final six lines extend the temporal imagination in an innovative way, almost in the spirit of science fiction:
 
We wonder, – and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
 
The two friends based their parallel poems on a Greek historian’s description: imagining the statue of Ozymandias, reading about the statue in that passage as part of their game, but not observing it. Admirably inventive, Smith’s poem extends the annihilation to a remote future in which London is covered by wilderness, an explicit obliteration that is implicit in Shelley’s image of dissolution – “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
These few examples are intended to suggest the large, gloriously idiosyncratic scope of wonder to be found in this anthology. The editor gives the last word to Yeats and the tireless artistry he attributes to the smithies of Byzantium where images are forged that continually proliferate and extend. Time is regenerative as well as destructive, and in a single process, violently creative,
 
. . . The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
 
 --Robert Pinsky 
Foreword by Robert Pinsky
Introduction by Murray Dewart
 
THE GODS
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Archaic Torso of Apollo
ROBERT PINSKY, Genesis According to George Segal
ISAIAH, “What likeness will you find for God”
EMILY DICKINSON, Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
DENISE LEVERTOV, Art
LAURA RIDING, Incarnations
ROBERT BLY, Chinese Tomb Guardians
DANA GIOIA, The Angel with the Broken Wing
CLAUDE MCKAY, Russian Cathedral
RUMI, The Ruins of the Heart
HENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY, The Tireless Sculptor
H. D., Adonis
DYLAN THOMAS, from Prologue to the Collected Poems
WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger
JACK GILBERT, Measuring the Tyger
ROBERT PINSKY, The Ghost Hammer
BASIL BUNTING, See! Their verses are laid
JOHN UPDIKE, Mobile of Birds
ELEANOR WILNER, Changing the Imperatives
KENNETH KOCH, Aesthetics of Stone
GEORGE HERBERT, Church-Monuments
WALTER DE LA MARE, The Stranger
ROSALYN DRISCOLL, Magdalene
GEOFFREY HILL, In Piam Memorium
JORIE GRAHAM, Pieta
RUDYARD KIPLING, Buddha at Kamakura 1892
THOMAS MERTON, Buddha Figures in Ceylon
KATHA POLLITT, Archaeology
DONALD HALL, On A Horse Carved in Wood
MARIANNE MOORE, I Tell You No Lie
TYEHIMBA JESS, Hagar in the Wilderness
 
LOVE AND THE BODY
JOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Urn
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Creating for Always
PHILIP LARKIN, An Arundel Tomb
W. B. YEATS, Sailing To Byzantium
SHARON OLDS, The Urn
JENNY HOLZER, Lamentations
C. K. WILLIAMS, Lost Wax
TERRANCE HAYES, from Arbor for Butch
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, A Sculptor
ADRIENNE RICH, Gerit Achterberg Statue
ROBERT GRAVES, Pygmalion to Galatea
DANTE MICHEAUX, Torso
ISAIAH, “The blacksmith sharpens a graving tool”
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, The Lover and the Sculptor
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Pygmalion’s Bride
MARIANNE MOORE, Rodin’s Penseur
JON DAVIS, The Invention of Ecstasy
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”
OVID, Orpheus Song: Pygmalion
 
WARFARE
VIRGIL, from The Aeneid
HOMER, The Shield of Achilles
SEAMUS HEANEY, In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
MARY SZYBIST, Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
POSIDIPPOS, On Alexander, Portrayed in Bronze
NATASHA TRETHAWEY, Elegy for the Native Guards
NIKKI GIOVANNI, But Since You Finally Asked
ROBERT LOWELL, For the Union Dead
W. S. MERWIN, The War
W. H. AUDEN, The Shield of Achilles
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, Facing It
 
MONUMENTS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”
JOHN MILTON, On Shakespear, 1630
WALLACE STEVENS, Anecdote of the Jar
BERNADETTE MAYER, Earthworks
WILLIAM STAFFORD, At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border
SAMUEL WESLEY, The Monument
ANONYMOUS, On the Setting Up Mr. Butler’s Monument in Westminster Abbey
ROBERT HERRICK, Pillar of Fame
CECILA VICUNA, Inkamisana
OSCAR WILDE, The Artist
PETER DAVISON, The Swordless Statue
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, To Inez Milholland
 
OBJECTS AND APPARITIONS
OCTAVIO PAZ, Objects & Apparitions
W. B. YEATS, Lapis Lazuli
MARGO LOCKWOOD, Blue Willow
DEBORA KUAN, Pastoral
HOWARD NEMEROV, from Ozymandias II
WALT WHITMAN, To a Locomotive in Winter
GARY SNYDER, Removing the Plate of the Pump on the Hydraulic System of a Backhoe
MOLLY BENDELL, Conversation with Eva Hesse
SYLVIA PLATH, Sculptor
EILEEN TABIOS, The Wire Sculpture
JOSEPH BRODSKY, A Footnote to Weather Forecasts
JOHN UPDIKE, Calder’s Hands
JONATHAN SWIFT, Shall I Repine?
JEAN ARP, In Flesh and Blood
LOUISE BOGAN, Statue and Birds
NATHANIEL MACKEY, Double Staccato
ROSAMOND ZIMMERMAN, Incomplete Open Cube
JULIA RANDALL, Sculptor
HARRIS BARRON, Brancusi’s Song
MINA LOY, Brancusi’s Golden Bird
ROBERT HAYDEN, Richard Hunt’s “Arachne”
RACHEL HADAS, Vermont Pilgrim in Granite and Bronze
JULIA RANDALL, For Henry Moore
MARIANNE MOORE, Is Your Town Nineveh?
WALLACE STEVENS, The Snow Man
HOWARD NEMEROV, Journey of the Snowmen
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Snow-Storm
ROBERT HAAS, Museum
STEPHEN SANDY, Christo’s Fence
ROBERT PINSKY, The Sky Sculpture  
 
ANTIQUITY
RAINER MARIA RILKE, In Rome
JOHN KEATS, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of Keats
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Ozymandias
MAY SWENSON, Fountains of Aix
RICHARD ALDINGTON, To a Greek Marble
W. B. YEATS, Men Improve with the Years
WILLIAM BRONK, The Beautiful Wall, Machu Picchu
HERMAN MELVILLE, Puzzlement
EDMUND SPENSER, from The Ruins of Time
HORACE SMITH, On a Stupendous Leg of Granite Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt
MARK DOTY, Apparition (Favorite Poem)
POSIDIPPUS, Three Poems
BILLY COLLINS, Greek and Roman Statuary
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, To Giovanni da Pistoia When Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, A Greek Statue
EMMA LAZARUS, The New Colossus
ELLA HIGGINSON, The Statue
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Michel Angelo in Reply to the Passage Upon His Statue of Night
JACK GILBERT, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
RICHARD WILBUR, A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra
JOSEPH BRODSKY, Porta San Pancrazio
AMY LOWELL, The Broken Fountain
LOUISE GLUCK, Tributaries
JAMES WRIGHT, Reading a 1979 Inscription on Belli’s Monument
CHARLES BAUDELARIE, Beauty
ROSANNA WARREN, Funerary Portraits
DEREK WALCOTT, From this Far
ROBERT PINSKY, The Figured Wheel
W. B. YEATS, Byzantium 

About

Poems About Sculpture is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form.

Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers of all kinds.

Excerpt

FOREWORD
 
This book is a good idea, executed with verve: by joining two arts, it invites fresh consideration of art itself. What has an art made of breath to do with an art made of matter? These lines by William Shakespeare suggest an answer, by concentrating on Time:
 
O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
(Sonnet 65)
 
Time registers movement as well as decay, sweetness as well as battering. In the dimension of time the unfolding vocal breath of a poem transpires; and also in the dimension of time the presence of a sculpture can appear in the round.
 
Variety rules here. Murray Dewart’s choices range beyond any duality of rock and steel on one side, ‘‘honey breath’’ on the other. Rhythms of confirmation and surprise, classic expectation and eccentric surprise, enliven this variously populated book. The context of sculpture gives a renewed sense to Yeats’s audacious vision of his soul’s embodiment in “Sailing to Byzantium”:
 
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
 
He not only imagines himself inhabiting an artifact, but also the vision is made the more peculiar by the object’s nature: small, ornamental, mechanical rather than natural. The bird, a piece of representational, kinetic sculpture, is also expressive. In the concluding line, the imagined work of art encompasses a sweeping, possibly enduring vision of past, present and future: Time comprehended.
 
By contrast, Sharon Olds’s “The Urn” offers a different account of an artifact – personal rather than heroic, actual rather than visionary – and is bold in something like an opposite way to “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here the poet alertly considers an actual, contemporary container for funerary ashes:
 
I had thought it would be tapered, with a small
waist and a pair of handles, silver-
plated, like a loving cup
or tennis trophy, but there on the table
was a smooth, square box, with a military
look, the stainless steel corners
soldered up, a container that could bury
radium waste.
 
The object she does not see, but expected, is described in a little more detail than the “smooth, square box” itself. In art, vision engages presence, but is not bound by it. Like Yeats’s bird, Olds’s poem exemplifies what might be called sculptural imagination. Both poems – and Shakespeare’s sonnet 65 too – consider shaped metal (or more precisely, the idea of shaped metal) in relation to death and afterlife.
 
Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is an inevitable choice for this book, being possibly the best-known poem in English about a statue. The sonnet indelibly presents the ruined statue’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” separated in the desert sand from the head’s “shatter’d visage” with its “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.” But it is here further illuminated by the inclusion of another poem on that same statue of Ozymandias: Horace Smith’s sonnet written as part of a friendly competition with his friend Shelley in 1818. Smith’s poem is good, and its comic sense – with a singular Leg and its initial capital – sharpens our sense of the sardonic in Shelley’s poem. Smith’s first eight lines make a point similar to Shelley’s, Time’s mockery of boastful grandeur:
 
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws,
The only shadow that the desert knows: –
‘‘I am the great Ozymandias,’’ saith the stone.
‘‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand. – The City’s gone, –
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
 
But Smith’s final six lines extend the temporal imagination in an innovative way, almost in the spirit of science fiction:
 
We wonder, – and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
 
The two friends based their parallel poems on a Greek historian’s description: imagining the statue of Ozymandias, reading about the statue in that passage as part of their game, but not observing it. Admirably inventive, Smith’s poem extends the annihilation to a remote future in which London is covered by wilderness, an explicit obliteration that is implicit in Shelley’s image of dissolution – “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
These few examples are intended to suggest the large, gloriously idiosyncratic scope of wonder to be found in this anthology. The editor gives the last word to Yeats and the tireless artistry he attributes to the smithies of Byzantium where images are forged that continually proliferate and extend. Time is regenerative as well as destructive, and in a single process, violently creative,
 
. . . The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
 
 --Robert Pinsky 

Table of Contents

Foreword by Robert Pinsky
Introduction by Murray Dewart
 
THE GODS
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Archaic Torso of Apollo
ROBERT PINSKY, Genesis According to George Segal
ISAIAH, “What likeness will you find for God”
EMILY DICKINSON, Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
DENISE LEVERTOV, Art
LAURA RIDING, Incarnations
ROBERT BLY, Chinese Tomb Guardians
DANA GIOIA, The Angel with the Broken Wing
CLAUDE MCKAY, Russian Cathedral
RUMI, The Ruins of the Heart
HENRIETTA CORDELIA RAY, The Tireless Sculptor
H. D., Adonis
DYLAN THOMAS, from Prologue to the Collected Poems
WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger
JACK GILBERT, Measuring the Tyger
ROBERT PINSKY, The Ghost Hammer
BASIL BUNTING, See! Their verses are laid
JOHN UPDIKE, Mobile of Birds
ELEANOR WILNER, Changing the Imperatives
KENNETH KOCH, Aesthetics of Stone
GEORGE HERBERT, Church-Monuments
WALTER DE LA MARE, The Stranger
ROSALYN DRISCOLL, Magdalene
GEOFFREY HILL, In Piam Memorium
JORIE GRAHAM, Pieta
RUDYARD KIPLING, Buddha at Kamakura 1892
THOMAS MERTON, Buddha Figures in Ceylon
KATHA POLLITT, Archaeology
DONALD HALL, On A Horse Carved in Wood
MARIANNE MOORE, I Tell You No Lie
TYEHIMBA JESS, Hagar in the Wilderness
 
LOVE AND THE BODY
JOHN KEATS, Ode on a Grecian Urn
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Creating for Always
PHILIP LARKIN, An Arundel Tomb
W. B. YEATS, Sailing To Byzantium
SHARON OLDS, The Urn
JENNY HOLZER, Lamentations
C. K. WILLIAMS, Lost Wax
TERRANCE HAYES, from Arbor for Butch
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, A Sculptor
ADRIENNE RICH, Gerit Achterberg Statue
ROBERT GRAVES, Pygmalion to Galatea
DANTE MICHEAUX, Torso
ISAIAH, “The blacksmith sharpens a graving tool”
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, The Lover and the Sculptor
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave”
CAROL ANN DUFFY, Pygmalion’s Bride
MARIANNE MOORE, Rodin’s Penseur
JON DAVIS, The Invention of Ecstasy
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments”
OVID, Orpheus Song: Pygmalion
 
WARFARE
VIRGIL, from The Aeneid
HOMER, The Shield of Achilles
SEAMUS HEANEY, In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge
MARY SZYBIST, Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
POSIDIPPOS, On Alexander, Portrayed in Bronze
NATASHA TRETHAWEY, Elegy for the Native Guards
NIKKI GIOVANNI, But Since You Finally Asked
ROBERT LOWELL, For the Union Dead
W. S. MERWIN, The War
W. H. AUDEN, The Shield of Achilles
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, Facing It
 
MONUMENTS
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”
JOHN MILTON, On Shakespear, 1630
WALLACE STEVENS, Anecdote of the Jar
BERNADETTE MAYER, Earthworks
WILLIAM STAFFORD, At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border
SAMUEL WESLEY, The Monument
ANONYMOUS, On the Setting Up Mr. Butler’s Monument in Westminster Abbey
ROBERT HERRICK, Pillar of Fame
CECILA VICUNA, Inkamisana
OSCAR WILDE, The Artist
PETER DAVISON, The Swordless Statue
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, To Inez Milholland
 
OBJECTS AND APPARITIONS
OCTAVIO PAZ, Objects & Apparitions
W. B. YEATS, Lapis Lazuli
MARGO LOCKWOOD, Blue Willow
DEBORA KUAN, Pastoral
HOWARD NEMEROV, from Ozymandias II
WALT WHITMAN, To a Locomotive in Winter
GARY SNYDER, Removing the Plate of the Pump on the Hydraulic System of a Backhoe
MOLLY BENDELL, Conversation with Eva Hesse
SYLVIA PLATH, Sculptor
EILEEN TABIOS, The Wire Sculpture
JOSEPH BRODSKY, A Footnote to Weather Forecasts
JOHN UPDIKE, Calder’s Hands
JONATHAN SWIFT, Shall I Repine?
JEAN ARP, In Flesh and Blood
LOUISE BOGAN, Statue and Birds
NATHANIEL MACKEY, Double Staccato
ROSAMOND ZIMMERMAN, Incomplete Open Cube
JULIA RANDALL, Sculptor
HARRIS BARRON, Brancusi’s Song
MINA LOY, Brancusi’s Golden Bird
ROBERT HAYDEN, Richard Hunt’s “Arachne”
RACHEL HADAS, Vermont Pilgrim in Granite and Bronze
JULIA RANDALL, For Henry Moore
MARIANNE MOORE, Is Your Town Nineveh?
WALLACE STEVENS, The Snow Man
HOWARD NEMEROV, Journey of the Snowmen
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Snow-Storm
ROBERT HAAS, Museum
STEPHEN SANDY, Christo’s Fence
ROBERT PINSKY, The Sky Sculpture  
 
ANTIQUITY
RAINER MARIA RILKE, In Rome
JOHN KEATS, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of Keats
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Ozymandias
MAY SWENSON, Fountains of Aix
RICHARD ALDINGTON, To a Greek Marble
W. B. YEATS, Men Improve with the Years
WILLIAM BRONK, The Beautiful Wall, Machu Picchu
HERMAN MELVILLE, Puzzlement
EDMUND SPENSER, from The Ruins of Time
HORACE SMITH, On a Stupendous Leg of Granite Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt
MARK DOTY, Apparition (Favorite Poem)
POSIDIPPUS, Three Poems
BILLY COLLINS, Greek and Roman Statuary
MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, To Giovanni da Pistoia When Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, A Greek Statue
EMMA LAZARUS, The New Colossus
ELLA HIGGINSON, The Statue
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Michel Angelo in Reply to the Passage Upon His Statue of Night
JACK GILBERT, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
RICHARD WILBUR, A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra
JOSEPH BRODSKY, Porta San Pancrazio
AMY LOWELL, The Broken Fountain
LOUISE GLUCK, Tributaries
JAMES WRIGHT, Reading a 1979 Inscription on Belli’s Monument
CHARLES BAUDELARIE, Beauty
ROSANNA WARREN, Funerary Portraits
DEREK WALCOTT, From this Far
ROBERT PINSKY, The Figured Wheel
W. B. YEATS, Byzantium