Poems Inspire Visual Art
Artist: Ernst Herter
Art Work: Heinrich Heine Fountain (Lorelei Fountain), Tyrolean marble
Location: Joyce Kilmer Park, 161st Street and Grand Concourse
Grades: 5-6
About the Art:. The fountain honors the 19th c. German poet, Heinrich Heine, by depicting his lyric poem, Die Lorelei. Die Lorelei is the legend of a siren whose beauty and irresistible singing lured sailors to their deaths at the dangerous narrows of the Rhine River. The Fountain’s marble base is strewn with aquatic animals and plants, and three monumental mermaids flank the foot. The poet appears in bas-relief on one side of the pillar. The fountain was donated by a group of German-Americans after Princess Elizabeth of Austria commissioned it from the artist. The sculpture has had numerous restorations because of repeated vandalism. Incidentally, ‘Joyce Kilmer’ was William Joyce Kilmer, poet of the famous poem that begins, "I think that I shall never see a Poem lovely as a tree," which almost all Bronx school children used to memorize.
Questions for Discussion: What do you notice about the fountain? Does it remind you of anything you have seen somewhere else? Do you know of any other works of public art that honor a poet or hero of another ethnicity than your own?
Sample Art Activity: Students create a collage to represent a poem, using photos, drawings and recycled magazine pages.
Purpose: To demonstrate awareness of how literature is used as inspiration for art.
Materials: construction paper about 12" x 18" for backgrounds; photos, drawings and recycled magazine pages; glue and brushes, scissors.
Teaching Strategies:
- Encourage students to choose poems that use words to set up pictures in the imagination, such as Wallace Stevens, M.C. Richards, and Kenneth Koch.
- Highlight sections of poems that give students visual ideas.
- Students cut up and rip magazine pages. (Sometimes a ripped edge adds emotional effect.)
- Encourage them to choose images that are different sizes, choosing one large one for emphasis.
- Children paint glue on background paper, then place collage items on wet glue.
- For display, an additional piece of construction paper that shows around the edge of the art work is an effective way to make it look special.
Closure: A display of the collages with labels, grouped by themes, is appropriate for events to which parents are invited. Students read the poems that inspired their collages.
Extensions: For kinesthetic and spatial learning, act out the ideas for sculptures in groups of 3 or 4; use each other to model heads to get the proportions right. For technology learning, search for contemporary poets and display printouts of their websites and poems, and check the site for the Poet Laureate of the US. For verbal learning, write poems in journals and include a description of the process students went through on the entire project.
National Art Education Learning Standards:
- Understanding and applying media, techniques and processes
- Using knowledge of structures and functions
- Choosing and evaluating a range of subject matter, symbols and ideas
- Understanding the visual arts in relation to history and cultures
- Reflecting upon and assessing the characteristics and merits of their work and the work of others
- Making connections between visual arts and other disciplines
