The Gazer's Spirit

This work celebrates the sister arts of poetry and painting. John Hollander, the poet and critic, has selected more than 50 works of art - paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and sculptures, from antiquity to the present - and matched them to poems that address the same images in their verses. This book focuses on leading examples of ecphrastic poetry, or poems that directly confront particular works of art. The heart of the book is a gallery of poems and images set side by side, such as Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" paired with Breugel the Elder's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" , and Edith Wharton's sonnet paired with Leonardo's "Mona Lisa". Other artists and writers featured include Robert Browning and Michelangelo; Walt Whitman and George Inness; and Randall Jarrell and Albrecht Durer writing and drawing about "The Knight, Death and the Devil". Among the poets are many visually sophisticated writers such as James Merrill, Richard Howard, Marianne Moore and Richard Wilbur; the visual objects in the book are both celebrated and obscure, as various as a Greek sculpture, a medieval tapestry, a famous Renoir, or a fountain by an anonymous architect. In some cases, obvious affinities, such as a poem by Vicki Hearne on a white horse by Gauguin, produce unexpected poetic results.