Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets

by J. D. McClatchy (Editor)

Overview

What are poets looking at, looking for, when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened language, vivid with nuance and color and force.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520069718
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/21/1989
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

J. D. McClatchy is Poetry Editor of The Yale Review, and his poems, essays, and reviews appear regularly in The New Republic, The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Art and Ideas
William Butler Yeats

Vorticism
Ezra Pound

A Matisse and
Painting in the American Grain
William Carlos Williams

Robert Andrew Parker
Marianne Moore

From Introduction to These Paintings
D. H. Lawrence

Pictures
Gertrude Stein

The Relations between Poetry and Painting
Wallace Stevens

Calm Even in the Catastrophe
W.H.Auden

Painters as Writers
Stephen Spender

Foreword to an Exhibit
E. E. Cummings

Gregorio Valdes
Elizabeth Bishop

The Heroic Object and Fernand Uger
Kenneth Rexroth

On Poetry and Painting,
with a Thought on Music
Howard Nemerov

Against Abstract Expressionism
Randall Jarrell

Jackson Pollock
Frank O'Hara

A Note on Franz Kline
Robert Creeley

An Art of Wondering
Robert Duncan

Balthus
Guy Davenport

Respect for Things as They Are
John Ashbery

The Painting of Jane Freilicher
James Schuyler

The Poet as Painter
Charles Tomlinson

The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly
Ted Hughes

Notes on Corot 3
James Merrill

Fragments of a "Rodin"
Richard Howard

Crossing the Tracks to Hopper's World
Mark Strand

Landscape's Empire
John Hollander

Editorial Reviews

It has sometimes been claimed that only painters should criticize painters; only poets, poets; and so on, as only those familiar with a field are qualified to examine it or its members. These two collections show clearly the questionable validity of this claim. In both collections, prominent American and European authors turn their attentions to the world of painting, and the results are generally thought-provoking and incisive. Frank O'Hara's piece on Jackson Pollock (McClatchy) is one of the best: Ernest Hemingway's on Joan Miro (Halpern) is one of the worst. The writers selected for inclusion by McClatchy are all 20th-century poets; Halpern's are predominantly prose writers. The selections in both books have been carefully chosen, and it would be wise to purchase both, as together they provide an excellent introduction to ``crossover'' criticism in the realm of the arts.Terry Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec

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