Poetry has always inspired artists and vice versa. Ever since the Roman poet Horace put down in his Ars Poetica (c. 13 BC) "ut pictura poesis" ("as is painting, so is poetry"), the two arts have been bounded together. Poets and painters have turned to one another for inspiration, and the dialogue has been mutually beneficial.
William Holman Hunt
The Lady of Shalott, 1905, oil on canvas.
Poem "The Lady of Shalott" (fragment) by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842 version).
Background: The character Lady of Shallot is based on the legendary Elaine, Donna di Scolatta from the 13th century. She has been cursed to view the world only as reflections in a mirror and to weave images in her tapestries. If she ever actually gazes outside her window, this will bring about the mysterious curse. Sir Lancelot rides past her window, she is enthralled enough to look directly at him, and the curse takes fatal effect.
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.
Gustav Klimt
The Kiss, 1908-1909, oil on canvas.
Poem ”More than a Kiss” by Isa Ampersand (2015).
It’s more than a kiss. It’s a secret being shared between lips.
It’s a light that only ignites when these two mouths collide.
It’s a way to start a forest fire and a means of breathing underwater.
It’s being born again and rekindling a desiring to live.
It’s a dream and it’s an awakening.
It’s how we connect to another person’s soul.
Pablo Picasso
The Old Guitarist, 1903-1904, oil on panel
Poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens (1937).
I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.
”The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.
”And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
III
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang if form a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings…
IV
So that’s life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in the autumn air,
And that’s life, then: things as they are,
This bussing of the blue guitar.
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