Thanks, everyone, for joining in. Chris, as the unofficial archivist of Eratosphere, kindly bumped up
an old thread on the same subject; Janice has locked it, purely to avoid confusion.
However, it is well worth reading through. There are some great contributions, including some
lengthy discussions of the subject by Rhina, among others. This website has a lot of buried treasures.
For those who haven't the time right now to read through the whole of the old thread I thought
it might be useful to post here a list of the poems that get mentioned, posted or discussed in it.
The list is not absolutely complete, but it does contain, I think, all the major examples:
Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Yeats: Leda and the Swan
Wilbur: “This Pleasing Anxious Being”
Christopher Bakken: “Terra Incognita”
Rhina Espaillat: “Rachmaninoff on the Mass Pike”
Rilke: “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Lowell: “For the Union Dead”
Lisa Barnett: “Whistler Decorates the Peacock Room”
Sylvia Plath: “Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies”, A Sestina for the Douanier
Tim Murphy: “The Muromachi Cranes”
Leslie Monsour: “After Young Thomas and His Mother” (Mary Cassatt)
Wendy Cope: The Uncertainty of the Poet” (De Chirico”)
James Crenner: “The Rondanini Pietà” (Michelangelo)
Fleur Adcock: “The Ex-Queen among the Astronomers”
Frank O’Hara: “Digression on Number 1, 1948” (Pollock), “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware…”
Elizabeth Bishop “Large Bad Picture”
Adrienne Rich: “I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus” (Cocteau film)
Sylvia Plath: “The Disquieting Muses” (De Chirico)
David Trinidad: “9 Cigarettes” (Bette Davis, All About Eve)
Williams: “Picture from Brueghel”
Hecht: “The Deodand”
Marianne Moore: “No Swan So Fine”
Thom Gunn: “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt”
Louis MacNeice: “The National Gallery”
UA Fanthorpe: “Not My Best Side” (Uccello, St George and the Dragon)
Larkin: “The Card Players”
O’Hara: “Why I Am Not a Painter”
Ashbery: “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Miroslav Holub: “Masterpiece”
M Cantor: “Japanese for Beginners”
Heaney: Poet’s Chair
X J Kennedy: “Nude Descending a Staircase”
Kazimir Malevich: “To Malevich’s Woodcutter”
Winfield Townley Scott: “Winslow Homer”
Edwin Muir: “The Annunciation”
Hans Magnus Enzensberger: “The Sinking of the Titanic”
Henri Coulette: “Intaglio”
Donald Justice: “Anonymous Drawing”
Robert Mezey: “Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel” (painting by Donald Justice)
Terese Coe: “Film noir: Out of the Past”
As you will see, some of the poems are by members of the Sphere, because Alicia encouraged
a mixture of "classics" and new works by members. However, since there is now a bumped-up
thread on D&A on the subject, and there is soon going to be an Ekphrastic Event here on the Sphere,
I suggest that we refrain from posting our own works on this thread. Of course, feel free to post other
members' poems, if you consider them classics (like the one by Alicia, already posted here). (
Editing in here, just to express total agreement with Mark's remarks above, with which I cross-posted.)
Here's a
link to the third section of Anthony Hecht's poem "Meditation". The section gives a wonderful
description of a Renaissance "sacra conversazione" painting; I don't think any specific work has been
identified here; you can spot details from various painters like Bellini and Cima da Conegliano.