Poems About Sculpture

Poems About Sculpture is a unique anthology of poems from around the world and across the ages about our most enduring art form.

Sculpture has the longest memory of the arts: from the Paleolithic era, we find stone carvings and clay figures embedded with human longing. And poets have long been fascinated by the idea of eternity embodied by the monumental temples and fragmented statues of ancient civilizations. From Keats’s Grecian urn and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to contemporary verse about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Janet Echelman’s wind-borne hovering nets, the pieces in this collection convert the physical materials of the plastic arts—clay, wood, glass, marble, granite, bronze, and more—into lapidary lines of poetry. Whether the sculptures celebrated here commemorate love or war, objects or apparitions, forms human or divine, they have called forth evocative responses from a wide range of poets, including Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rilke, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, and Plath. A compendium of dazzling examples of one art form reflecting on another, Poems About Sculpture is a treat for art lovers of all kinds.

MURRAY DEWART is an internationally recognized sculptor who has built large public sculptures in China, Israel, and across the United States. He has work in more than thirty permanent collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, and the Museum of San Marco University in Lima, Peru. ROBERT PINSKY, former poet laureate of the United States, is the author of nineteen books, including an acclaimed translation of Dante's Inferno.