While we wait for the event proposed over on GT by Philip Quinlan (and taken up enthusiastically by others) to find its final form, I thought this forum might be a suitable place to look at some classics of the art.
And we might as well start with one of the most famous. So here's Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts":
Quote:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
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"The Shield of Achilles" is obviously another example of an ekphrastic poem, but it can also be seen as a kind of commentary on, or summation of, the entire genre.
Anyway, I'd be interested to see other people's favourite examples, together with any observations on the poems - and the genre itself.
By the way, does anyone know who it was that launched the cry "No more poems about paintings"? I remember reading it somewhere and now can only find it as the title of an essay by Edna Longley, but with a question mark, suggesting that she doesn't necessarily go along with the notion.