Famous Painters Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Painters poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous painters poems. These examples illustrate what a famous painters poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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The Allies

by Amy Lowell
 August 14th, 1914

Into the brazen, burnished sky, the cry hurls itself. The 
zigzagging cry
of hoarse throats, it floats against the hard winds, and binds the 
head
of the serpent to its tail, the long snail-slow serpent of marching 
men.
Men weighed down with rifles and knapsacks, and parching with war.
The cry jars and splits against the brazen, burnished sky.
This is the...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXIV

by William Shakespeare
 Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stell'd
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is the painter's art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies;
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see...Read more of this...

Hiawathas Photographing

by Lewis Carroll
 From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing; 

But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid. 

This he perched upon a tripod -
Crouched beneath its...Read more of this...

Paris

by Alan Seeger
 First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . 


Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
Than, having beauty and your twenty years, 
You have the means...Read more of this...

Ariste

by Robert Southey
 Let ancient stories round the painter's art, 
Who stole from many a maid his Venus' charms, 
Till warm devotion fired each gazer's heart 
And every bosom bounded with alarms. 
He culled the beauties of his native isle, 
From some the blush of beauty's vermeil dyes, 
From some the lovely look, the winning smile, 
From some the languid lustre of...Read more of this...

A Letter To My Aunt

by Dylan Thomas
 A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry

To you, my aunt, who would explore
The literary Chankley Bore,
The paths are hard, for you are not
A literary Hottentot
But just a kind and cultured dame
Who knows not Eliot (to her shame).
Fie on you, aunt, that you should see
No genius in David G.,
No elemental form and sound
In T.S.E. and...Read more of this...

To S. M. a young African Painter on seeing his Works

by Phillis Wheatley
To show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire
To aid...Read more of this...

The Sun Weilds Mercy

by Charles Bukowski
 and the sun weilds mercy
but like a jet torch carried to high,
and the jets whip across its sight
and rockets leap like toads,
and the boys get out the maps
and pin-cuishon the moon,
old green cheese,
no life there but too much on earth:
our unwashed India boys
crosssing their legs,playing pipes,
starving with sucked in bellies,
watching the snakes volute
like beautiful women in the hungry air;
the...Read more of this...

The Heavenly Hills of Holland

by Henry Van Dyke
 The heavenly hills of Holland,--
How wondrously they rise 
Above the smooth green pastures
Into the azure skies!
With blue and purple hollows,
With peaks of dazzling snow, 
Along the far horizon
The clouds are marching slow. 

No mortal foot has trodden
The summits of that range, 
Nor walked those mystic valleys
Whose colors ever change; 
Yet we possess their beauty,
And visit them in dreams, 
While...Read more of this...

Earthfast

by A S J Tessimond
 Architects plant their imagination, weld their poems on rock,
Clamp them to the skidding rim of the world and anchor them down to its core;
Leave more than the painter's or poet's snail-bright trail on a friable leaf;
Can build their chrysalis round them - stand in their sculpture's belly.

They see through stone, they cage and partition air, they cross-rig space
With footholds,...Read more of this...

Proclamation Without Pretension

by Tristan Tzara
 Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief

The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances

Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins

CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS

Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance...Read more of this...

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I)

by Ezra Pound
 "Vocat aestus in umbram" 
Nemesianus Es. IV. 

E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre 

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start --

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on...Read more of this...

The Pleasure of Princes

by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
 What pleasures have great princes? These: to know 
Themselves reputed mad with pride or power; 
To speak few words -- few words and short bring low 
This ancient house, that city with flame devour;

To make old men, their father's enemies,
Drunk on the vintage of the former age;
To have great painters show their mistresses
Naked to the succeeding time; engage

The cunning...Read more of this...

Her Vision In The Wood

by William Butler Yeats
 Dry timber under that rich foliage,
At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood,
Too old for a man's love I stood in rage
Imagining men. Imagining that I could
A greater with a lesser pang assuage
Or but to find if withered vein ran blood,
I tore my body that its wine might cover
Whatever could rccall the lip of lover.

And after that I held my...Read more of this...

When You Go Away

by W S Merwin
 When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes
In one breath I wake
It is the time when the beards of the dead...Read more of this...

To Mary On Receiving Her Picture

by George (Lord) Byron
 This faint resemblance of thy charms,
(Though strong as mortal art could give,)
My constant heart of fear disarms,
Revives my hopes, and bids me live.

Here, I can trace the locks of gold
Which round thy snowy forehead wave;
The cheeks which sprung from Beauty's mould,
The lips, which made me Beauty's slave.

Here I can trace---ah, no! that eye,
Whose azure floats in liquid fire,
Must all...Read more of this...

Sonnet 24: Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled

by William Shakespeare
 Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is best painter's art.
For through the painter must you see his skill
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazèd with thine eyes.
Now see...Read more of this...

The Gardener LIX: O Woman

by Rabindranath Tagore
 O woman, you are not merely the
handiwork of God, but also of men;
these are ever endowing you with
beauty from their hearts.
Poets are weaving for you a web
with threads of golden imagery;
painters are giving your form ever
new immortality.
The sea gives its pearls, the mines
their gold, the summer gardens their
flowers to deck you, to cover you, to
make you more precious.
The desire...Read more of this...

James Simmons R.i.p

by Barry Tebb
 You were the one I wanted most to know

So like yet unlike, like fire and snow,

The casual voice, the sharp invective,

The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant

Who never gave a ****, crossed the palms

Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt

For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry

Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant.



You wrote from the heart,...Read more of this...

Orlie Wilde

by James Whitcomb Riley
 A goddess, with a siren's grace,--
A sun-haired girl on a craggy place
Above a bay where fish-boats lay
Drifting about like birds of prey.

Wrought was she of a painter's dream,--
Wise only as are artists wise,
My artist-friend, Rolf Herschkelhiem,
With deep sad eyes of oversize,
And face of melancholy guise.

I pressed him that he tell to me
This masterpiece's history.
He turned--REturned--and thus beguiled
Me with the...Read more of this...

Epilogue

by Robert Lowell
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme-
why are they no help to me now
i want to make
something imagined not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens 
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything i write
With the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot 
lurid rapid garish grouped 
heightened from life 
yet paralyzed by...Read more of this...

Daughter

by Gertrude Stein
 Why is the world at peace.
This may astonish you a little but when you realise how
easily Mrs. Charles Bianco sells the work of American
painters to American millionaires you will recognize that
authorities are constrained to be relieved. Let me tell you a
story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing.
A South African loved books. An American was a...Read more of this...

Hiawathas photographing ( Part III )

by Lewis Carroll
 Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab: 
He suggested curves of beauty, 
Curves pervading all his figure, 
Which the eye might follow onward, 
Till they centered in the breast-pin, 
Centered in the golden breast-pin. 
He had learnt it all from Ruskin 
(Author of 'The Stones of Venice,' 
'Seven Lamps of Architecture,' 
'Modern Painters,' and some others); 
And perhaps he had not...Read more of this...

Beatrice Cenci

by Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
O beautiful woman, too well we know
The terrible weight of thy woman's woe,
So great that the world, in its careless way,
Remembered thy beauty for more than a day.
In the name of the truth from thy brow is torn
The crown of redemption thou long hast worn,
And into the valley of sin thou art hurled
To be trampled anew by the feet of...Read more of this...

To S.M. A Young African Painter On Seeing His Works

by Phillis Wheatley
 O show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire...Read more of this...

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