An exploration of the psychology of art observation is based on the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, noting how a vast number of people went to look at the empty place in the Louvre where the painting once stood, and considers what art represents, its creative process, the reasons people look at art, and the costs associated with masterpieces. Reprint. With Lament for the Makers W. S. Merwin honors the lives and work of twenty-three poets of our time. Each of them has been important to him, and all of them died during his life as a poet. Following the title poem, Merwin presents works by Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Muir, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, David Jones, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Howard Moss, Robert Graves, Howard Nemerov, William Stafford, and James Merrill. Photographs and brief biographies of the poets are also included. Lament for the Makers connects the work of one of our most gifted contemporary poets with the modern masters who have defined the twentieth-century poetic tradition.