Painting and Poetry Overview
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Lecture Points
An exciting element of teaching modernism as a poetic form is that this is a period where genres of creative expression -- painting, fiction, poetry, and film -- really begin to "speak" to each other in a way that they had not before (or not as much). In this mini-unit, students will explore art in two separate mediums of painting and poetry, exploring how a painting speaks to a poem, how a poem can give voice to a painting. Students may then take those skills and in a creative assessment, write a poem of their own. |
Pieter Breughel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
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W. H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux-Arts"
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. |
William Carlos Williams, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry of the year was awake tingling with itself sweating in the sun that melted the wings' wax unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning |
Maya Lin, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
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Yusef Komunyakaa, "Facing It"
My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair. |
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William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act IV.vii)
Gertrude: There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them. There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element; but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. |
Directions for Ekphrasis Assignment
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Directions
The word "ekphrasis" means "a poem written about a work of art." In this case, you've seen a number of possibilities. Now it's your turn.
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Marc Chagall, Lovers Near Bridge
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Hans Holbein, Anne of Cleves
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Edward Hopper, Girl at Sewing Machine
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Frida Kahlo, Las Dos Fridas (Self-Portrait)
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Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights (Detail)
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Norman Rockwell, Breaking Home Ties
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Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon
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