Your kingship is good for the people. The people spend their days in abundance thanks to you.
A Praise Poem of Iddin-Dagan
1900 BCE
The Oldest Love Poem
800 BCEWake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
The Rubaiyat
Omar Khayyam1120Six Tuscan Poets
Giorgio Vasari1544And I who am changed through her, as the winged magician wishes, do not see or ask anything but virtue and beauty, whence I could perhaps discern your whole soul.
Sonnets for Laura Battiferri
Agnolo Bronzino1560Without doubt you can call him John Testicle, who sets himself to criticizing someone else who could be his master for a hundred years.
Poems in mockery of painter Giovanni Baglione
Caravaggio1603And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs — Every child may joy to hear.
Songs of Innocence
William Blake1789I travelled through a land of men, A land of men and women too, And heard and saw such dreadful things, As cold earth wanderers never knew.
The Mental Traveler
William Blake1803Must toiling Man for ever meet disgrace, and eat his hard earn’d bread with heated face, and all his acts in dull Oblivion lay
On Labour, Creativity and Patriotism
Joseph Mallord William Turner1809The Poet Dainagon Sees an Apparition
Utagawa Kuniyoshi1860In this city of the generous, all are chivalrous
From a Paris Window–High
Marsden Hartley1913I’d like to find and lose the philosopher’s stone. Make love and never lose control. Remove a great number of living beings with impunity. Afterward resuscitate a very small number of the dead.
Convulsionnaires
Man Ray, André Breton1937Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto
Florine StettheimerSad poems from a strange artist
1949