This magnificent book is a gallery of words and images that celebrates the sister arts of poetry and painting. John Hollander, the eminent poet and critic, has selected more than fifty works of art—paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures from antiquity to the present—and matched them to poems that address the same images in their verses. The result is an illuminating and ingeniously organized chronicle of words and images in conversation, as well as a powerful introduction to how, across Western culture, great writers have been inspired by pictures. The Gazer's Spirit focuses on leading examples of ecphrastic poetry, or poems that directly confront particular works of art. Hollander, who is one of the most distinguished contemporary practitioners of the ecphrastic tradition, has crafted a survey of enormous range, taste, and depth, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The heart of the book is its gallery of poems and images set side by side. There are poems whose presence in this book is all but inevitable, such as Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" paired with Breugel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and delightful surprises, such as Edith Wharton's sonnet that casts fresh light on Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Here are Robert Browning and Michelangelo; Walt Whitman and George Inness; and Randall Jarrell and Albrecht Dürer writing and drawing about The Knight, Death and the Devil. Among the poets are many visually sophisticated writers such as James Merrill, Richard Howard, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur; the visual objects in the book are both celebrated and obscure, as various as a Greek sculplture, a medieval tapestry, a famous Renoir, or a fountain by an anonymous architect. In some cases, obvious affinities, such as a poem by Vicki Hearne on a white horse by Gauguin, produce unexpected poetic results.

The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art

Literature & Fiction

John Hollander

Various, Authors

Poetry

University of Chicago Press

Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse

In his classic text Rhyme's Reason the distinguished poet and critic John Hollander surveys the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse, illustrating each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In this substantially expanded and revised edition, Hollander adds a section of examples taken from centuries of poetry that exhibit the patterns he has described.

Rhyme's reason: A guide to English verse

Yale University Press

A sparkling collection of poems about virtually every aspect of matrimony: courtships and weddings, adulteries and separations, domestic harmony, wedded bliss. Here are marriages made in many cultures and eras, delightfully evoked by poets ranging from Shakespeare to Omar Khayyám to D.H. Lawrence and Mona Van Duyn. From the rapturous infatuation of the Song of Songs to Ovid's cynical advice on 'The Art of Deceiving a Husband,' no facet of the matrimonial state remains unexplored.

Marriage Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)

History & Criticism

Everyman"s Library

Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.

Jiggery Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, With a New Epilogue

Anthony Hecht

Scribner/Atheneum

Gathers still lifes and nudes, both drawings and paintings, of the American artist, and discusses his approach to art

William Bailey

Giuliano Briganti

Arts & Photography

Rizzoli

American Poetry 19th Century 2

Taylor&Francis

American Poetry

Crossing Boundaries: The Art of Lee Waisler

Arturo Schwarz

MapinPub

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Books by John Hollander