In Competition No. 3341 you were invited to submit a poem about a great work of art – a challenge prompted by George Steiner’s observation that ‘the best readings of art are art’.
The writer Geoff Dyer has cited W.H. Auden’s 1938 ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ – about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ and our relationship to suffering – as an example of this: (‘About suffering they were never wrong,/ The old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position…/ …how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster…’).
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