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Poetic Likeness: Words, Art, and History Compiled by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Target Grade Level: 6–12 in language arts and social studies classes

Objectives After completing this lesson, students will be better able to:

Identify and analyze key components of a portrait and relate visual elements to relevant

historical context and significance.

Analyze and explain the connections between modern poets and their historical eras.

Analyze and explain the literary and historical relationships between various modern

poets.

Create graphic representations or free verse poems that reflect their understanding of the

connections between poets and their portraits, poetry, and historical eras.

Portraits Visit the “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets” online exhibition at

http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/poets/index.html.

Materials Poetic Likeness portraits (available in the online exhibition)

Poetic Likeness: Words, Art, and History Worksheet

Poetry Excerpts handout

Background Information for Teachers In the twentieth century, American poets created a literature that was both responsive to history

as they experienced it and linguistically inventive in a manner that influenced writing worldwide.

Whereas previously American poetry was largely a derivative branch of British verse, by the turn

of the century it was poised to declare its independence as a distinctive literary tradition. Modern

American poets built on the foundation that Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound had created: our

nation’s poetry should express both the aspirations of our democracy (Whitman) and be formally

well-crafted, using language that was innovative and responsive to both poetic tradition and the

present moment (Pound). Pound put it simply when he charged American poets with their task:

“Make it new.” And they did.

“Poetic Likeness” draws on the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection to

illustrate the makers of modern American poetry. It begins with the founders, Whitman and

Pound, and moves through the century, ending in the 1970s, when a more confessional form of

poetry replaced the tradition of high modernism that is the subject of this exhibition. Poets who

are considered particularly inventive and influential—the makers of modernism—are given a

cluster of portraits to signal their importance. But all the poets represented here are delightful in

the variety and inventiveness of their written work. Their work repays reading and rereading,

both for what is found there and also as evidence of poetry’s essential role in creating modern

American culture.

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Lesson Procedure

1. Have students browse the “Poetic Likeness” online exhibition, read the Poetry Excerpts

handout (below), and then complete the Poetic Likeness: Words, Art and History

Worksheet (below).

2. Using the information from their worksheet, the Poetry Excerpt handout, and any other

available resources on their chosen poet and his or her era, students should create either a

free-verse poem or a graphic representation (using only words). Their poems or

representations should do the following:

Respond to the poets’ portrait and poetry excerpt.

Connect the poet to his or her era in American history.

3. Put students in pairs, being sure that no pair has focused on the same poet. In pairs,

students will share their poems/representations and answer the following: What literary and/or historical connections can you make between your two

chosen poets? How did the two poets influence each other?

National Standards of Learning Standards in History for Grades 5–12

Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870–1900) How the rise of corporations, heavy industry, and mechanized farming transformed the

American people

Massive immigration after 1870 and how new social patterns, conflicts, and ideas of

national unity developed amid growing cultural diversity

Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890–1930)

How Progressives and others addressed problems of industrial capitalism, urbanization,

and political corruption

The changing role of the United States in world affairs through World War I

How the United States changed from the end of World War I to the eve of the Great

Depression

Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II

How the New Deal addressed the Great Depression, transformed American federalism,

and initiated the welfare state

The causes and course of World War II, the character of the war at home and abroad, and

its reshaping of the U.S. role in world affairs

Era 9: Postwar United States (1945-early 1970s)

The economic boom and social transformation of postwar United States

How the Cold War and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam influenced domestic and

international politics

Domestic policies after World War II

The struggle for racial and gender equality and the extension of civil liberties

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Standards in English Language Arts for Grades K–12

NL-ENG.K-12.1: Reading for Perspective

Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of

themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to

respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment.

Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

NL-ENG.K-12.2: Understanding the Human Experience

Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an

understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human

experience.

NL-ENG.K-12.6: Applying Knowledge

Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and

punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss

print and nonprint texts.

NL-ENG.K-12.7: Evaluating Data

Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by

posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print

and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their

purpose and audience.

NL-ENG.K-12.8: Developing Research Skills

Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases,

computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate

knowledge.

NL-ENG.K-12.11: Participating in Society

Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of

literacy communities.

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POETIC LIKENESS WORKSHEET: WORDS, ART, AND HISTORY

Browse the exhibition and choose one poet to explore. Analyze your chosen poet’s portrait, read the accompanying label text, and then answer the following questions.

1. Poet: _______________________________________

2. What visual elements in the portrait reflect aspects of the poet’s biography and/or poetic achievements?

3. How does this poet fit into topics in American history? How can you connect him or her to movements, events, and/or themes in American history?

4. Read the poem excerpt on the wall next to the portrait. Choose 3–5 words from that poem excerpt that, in your opinion, capture the feel of the poet’s work or era. The words do not have to appear next to each other in the poem. Write the words here:

5. Choose a second poet in the exhibition who either influenced or was influenced by your poet in some way. Explain the connection between the two sitters.

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POETIC LIKENESS: MODERN AMERICAN POETS

POETRY EXCERPTS

Walt Whitman

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loaf and invite my soul,

I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. From “Song of Myself,” 1855

Ezra Pound

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It was you that broke the new wood,

Now is a time for carving.

We have one sap and one root—

Let there be commerce between us. From “A Pact,” 1916

William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens. “The Red Wheel Barrow,” 1923

Hart Crane

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty— From “The Bridge,” 1933

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Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town. From “Directive,” 1947

Marianne Moore

There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious

fastidiousness. Certain Ming

products, imperial floor coverings of coach—

wheel yellow, are well enough in their way but I have seen something

that I like better— From “Critics and Connoisseurs,” 1924

Jean Toomer

whisper of yellow globes

gleaming on lamp-posts that sway

like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me

like bright beads on yellow globes From “Her Lips Are Copper Wire,” 1923

Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,

Shovel them under and let me work—

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work. From “Grass,” 1918

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H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,

hating it deeper still

when it grows wan and white,

remembering past enchantments

and past ills. From “Helen,” 1924

Claude McKay

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,

And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,

Stealing my breath of life, I will confess

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! From “America,” 1922

Marsden Hartley

When the surf licks with its tongues

these volcanic personal shapes, which we,

defining for ourselves as rocks, accept

them as such, at its feverish incoming

isn’t it too, in its way, something like

the plain image of life? From “Indian Point,” 1943

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Was it for this I uttered prayers,

And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,

That now, domestic as a plate,

I should retire at half-past eight? “Grown-Up,” 1920

Gertrude Stein

Very fine is my valentine

Very fine and very mine.

Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.

Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very

mine and mine is my valentine. From “A Very Valentine,” 1922

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Robinson Jeffers

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine

And pain a few days: cat nor coyote

Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. From “Hurt Hawks,” 1928

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

And he had reasons. From “Miniver Cheevy,” 1910

E. E. Cummings

I was sitting in mcsorley’s. outside it was New York and beautifully snowing.

Inside snug and evil. the slobbering walls filthily push witless creases of screaming warmth From [I was sitting in mcsorley’s], 1925

W. H. Auden For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth. From “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 1940

Frank O’Hara

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing From “The Day Lady Died,” 1964

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James Merrill

My father, who had flown in World War I,

Might have continued to invest his life

In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.

But the race was run below, and the point was to win. From “The Broken Home,” 1966

Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. From “One Art,” 1976

Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after. From “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” 1923

Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death; From “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” 1928

Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked

down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking

at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon

fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! From “A Supermarket in California,” 1955

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T. S. Eliot

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. From “The Waste Land,” 1922

Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail. From “Diving into the Wreck,” 1973

Sylvia Plath

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air. From “Lady Lazarus,” 1962

May Swenson

Blue, but you are Rose, too,

and buttermilk, but with blood

dots showing through.

A little salty your white

nape boy-wide. From “Blue,” 1994

Galway Kinnell

In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

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this blessing love gives again into our arms. From “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” 1980

Anne Sexton

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

Death’s a sad Bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,

to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison. From “Wanting to Die,” 1966

Denise Levertov

I like to find

what’s not found

at once, but lies

within something of another nature,

in repose, distinct. From “Pleasures,” 1959

Archibald MacLeish A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds. From “Ars Poetica,” 1926

Robert Creeley

Out the door, the street like a night,

any night, and no one in sight,

but then, well, there she is,

old friend Liz— From “A Wicker Basket,” 1959

Audre Lorde

There are many kinds of open

how a diamond comes into a knot of flame

how sound comes into a words, coloured

by who pays what for speaking. From “Coal,” 1968

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James Dickey

Lies in the fields in this field on her broken back as though on

A cloud she cannot drop through while farmers sleepwalk without

Their women from houses a walk like falling toward the far waters

Of life in moonlight toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms From “Falling,” 1981

Randall Jarrell

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” 1945

Thom Gunn

I wake up cold, I who

Prospered through dreams of heat

Wake to their residue,

Sweat, and a clinging sheet.

My flesh was its own shield:

Where it was gashed, it healed. From “The Man with Night Sweats,” 1992

John Ashbery

One feels too confined,

Sifting the April sunlight for clues,

In the mere stillness of the ease of its

Parameter. The hand holds no chalk

And each part of the whole falls off

And cannot know it knew, except

Here and there, in cold pockets

Of remembrance, whispers out of time. From “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” 1975

Stanley Kunitz

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,

I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth,

fighting my sleep,

and one night saw a Hessian soldier

stand at attention there in full

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regalia, till his head broke into flames. From “River Road,” 1971

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

He had got, finally,

to the forest

of motives. There were no

owls, or hunters. No Connie Chatterleys

resting beautifully

on their backs, having casually

brought socialism

to England.

Only ideas

and their opposites.

Like,

he was really

nowhere. “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters,” 1964

Howard Nemerov

Flaubert wanted to write a novel

About nothing. It was to have no subject

And be sustained upon the style alone,

Like the Holy Ghost cruising above

The abyss . . . From “Style,” 1967

Robert Duncan

She it is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words

that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun’s going down From “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” 1960

Kenneth Koch

One father or one brother may hide the man,

If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.

So always standing in front of something the other

As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.

One wish may hide another. From “One Train May Hide Another,” 1994

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Charles Olson

I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I. Maximus

a metal hot from boiling water, tell you

what is a lance, who obeys the figures of

the present dance From “The Maximus Poems,” 1953

Kenneth Rexroth

In the afternoon thin blades of cloud

Move over the mountains;

The storm clouds follow them;

Fine rain falls without wind.

The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.

When the rain pauses the clouds

Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls. From “Falling Leaves and Early Snow,” 1940

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry. From “Eating Poetry,” 1968

Richard Wilbur

Nothing escapes him of her body’s grace

Or of her floodlit skin, so sleek and warm

And yet so strangely like a uniform,

But what now grips his fancy is her face,

And how the cunning picture holds her still From “Playboy,” 1969

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The changing light

at San Francisco

is none of your East Coast light

none of your

pearly light of Paris

The light of San Francisco

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is a sea light

an island light From “The Changing Light,” 2001

Robert Penn Warren

I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.

It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags

Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming

Of dream-spectral light above the lazy purity of snow-snags. From “Mortal Limit,” 1985

Amy Clampitt

While you walk the water’s edge,

turning over concepts

I can’t envision, the honking buoy

serves notice that at any time

the wind may change From “Beach Glass,” 1987

Robert Lowell

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself—

to ask compassion From “Dolphin,” 1973

Yusef Komunyakaa

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. From “Facing It,” 1988