Poets and Museum Artworks
The popular movie series, Night at the Museum, imagines displays coming to life after the doors close and the lights go off. This silly premise works, I suspect, because it draws upon something we already believe to be true: that museums are more than just storehouses of dusty relics, that they are staging-grounds where the visitor encounters the “Other”—whether in the form of a long-dead creature, a rare beetle, or a foreign culture.
Reading: as witnesses to this phenomenon, I call to the stand four poets. Each writes in response to a museum artifact, employing ekphrasis to set the artwork before the reader’s eye and (sometimes) apostrophe and prosopopoeia to engage it in conversation:
- Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ozymandias,” 1817 (link)
- John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1818 (link)
- W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 1938 (link)
- George the Poet, “The Benin bronze,” 2015 (link)
Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:
- Highlight a moment in one of these poems where the object responds to inquiry in an unexpected way, surprising the poet—or teaching the audience something new.
- All four poems dramatize the poet’s encounter with the past. Focusing on one or two of them, reflect on what they teach us about history and/or the passage of time.