What are poets looking at, looking for, when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened language, vivid with nuance and color and force.

J. D. McClatchy is Poetry Editor of The Yale Review, and his poems, essays, and reviews appear regularly in The New Republic, The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.

"By this century, poets and picture makers were as intimately associated as poets and musicians had been. This superb collection of utterly characteristic, scintillant, and riveting writings by Yeats, Pound, Williams, Lawrence, Stein, Stevens, Auden, cummings, Rexroth, and 16 others demonstrates how firmly cemented that intimacy is."—Ray Olson, Booklist

"J. D. McClatchy has addressed a topic of real interest. . . . I think this is a book that many painters might well read with pleasure."—Christopher Reid, Times Literary Supplement

"It is invigorating to read about art in writings by sensitive, intelligent observers who love art but are not art critics. . . . These writers are so gloriously themselves in these works. It is an object lesson in the truth that a great writer's style and preoccupations are not just put on like a coat but grow from within and find their way to the surface no matter the subject at hand."—Stevenson Swanson, Chicago Tribune

"Although they agree on little else in the inspiringly cross-purposed jumble of their enthusiasms, these essays return again and again to the belief that looking at art moves us into a larger and more spacious world, into a state of consciousness most simply described as spiritual. This belief—sometimes at the center of the essay, sometimes hovering around its edges—gives these pieces, taken in the aggregate, a significance beyond what any one of them would have had by itself."—Jim Moore, The Hungry Mind Review

"When poets turn their attention to arrangements of oil on canvas, we can expect the unexpected. . . . The ultimate value of this anthology and the reason it deserves a wider readership lie in the way it reminds us that a responsibility—and a joy—of the art writer, in [Richard] Howard's words, is to 'ransack the world in search of eloquence. . . one wants the terms by which to declare one's adoration.'"—Jan Heller Levi, Artforum