You know if the National Portrait Gallery is going to hold an exhibit featuring the portraits of poets it’s going to be a good one.
“Poetic License: Modern American Poets ” pays homage to over 50 poets and includes over 75 works.
The core seeds of the exhibit are Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound and it all starts with the iconic photo of Walt Whitman taken by G.Frank Pearsall in 1872.
From the Prologue:
By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was developing a distinctive artistic and cultural identity, one rooted in the specific conditions and history of American life. American poetry grew in technical sophistication, and with Walt Whitman it broke the shackles of literary gentility to create a language that expressed the fullness of American democracy.By the turn of the twentieth century, Whitman and then Ezra Pound had created a platform on which subsequent writers would create quintessentially modern verse: bright, linguistically innovative and above all engaged with the tumultuous, energetic society of which they were an essential part.
Throughout, there was a close link between poetry and artists, the two arts intertwining to create modernist culture. Poetic Likeness is a record of that partnership, putting a face to the distinctive voices of American poetry.
The online component also includes a section, The Spoken Word which features audio of Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and John Ashbery reading from their work.
The exhibit runs through April of 2013 and is a must see if you are in the area.