TeeJaay, in partial answer to your question,
Where are the great works of art inspired by poetry?, the Pre-Raphaelites were fond of John Keats, and we have Sir John Everett Millais's
Lorenzo and Isabella, illustrative of Keats's poem, "Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil," followed by William Holman Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil," 1866-1868. Some interesting trivia: while Millais accurately portrays Isabella as pining to death -- wan and thin -- Hunt was unable to paint Isabella this way, as his chosen model was his wife, Fanny, eight months pregnant at the time. She held her pose for hours in the Florentine September heat. Their son was born in October, but Fanny, unable to recover from the birth, died in December. Hunt thereafter threw himself into the work as a sort of mourning ritual, eventually creating a life-size version of his wife (to whom he had been married only eleven and a half months). His finished picture is over six feet tall. You can view both prints here:
http://www.abcgallery.com/liter/keats.html
Jennifer