Wall poems in Leiden

Wall Poems (Dutch: Muurgedichten, alternatively Gedichten op muren or Dicht op de Muur) is a project in which more than 110 poems in many different languages were painted on the exterior walls of buildings in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands.^[1][2][3]

The Wall Poems project was partly funded by the private Tegen-Beeld foundation of Ben Walenkamp and Jan Willem Bruins, the project's two artists, with additional funding from several corporations and the city of Leiden.^[2][4] It began in 1992 with a poem in Russian by Marina Tsvetaeva and (temporarily) finished in 2005 with the Spanish poem De Profundis by Federico García Lorca.^[4] Other poets included in the set include E. E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Jan Hanlo, Du Fu, Louis Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats,^[3][5] as well as local writers Piet Paaltjens and J. C. Bloem.^[4] One of the more obscure poems in the collection is written in the Buginese language on a canal wall near the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies; it and many of the other poems are accompanied by plaques with translations into Dutch and English.^[2]

A guide available on the web describes a walking tour for visitors to Leiden that takes in 25 of the 101 poems.^[6] The first 43 poems have been collected in a book by Marleen van der Weij, Dicht op de muur: gedichten in Leiden, and the rest are described in a second volume, published in 2005.^[7]

• 
  William Shakespeare
• 
  E.E. Cummings
• 
  Du Fu
• 
  Seiichi Niikuni
• 
  Cesare Simonetti
• 
  Marina Tsvetaeva
• 
  Louis Oliver
• 
  Federico García Lorca
• 
  Osip Mandelstam
• 
  Cees van Hoore
• 
  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
• 
  Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
• 
  Nils Ferlin
• 
  Bashō
• 
  Ranggawarsita
• 
  Vallana
• 
  Wisława Szymborska
• 
  Joost van Gijzen
• 
  Robert Frost

Based on the success of the Leiden poetry project, wall poems have also been painted in several other Dutch cities.^[8][9] In 2004 the Dutch embassy to Bulgaria launched a similar project in Sofia,^[10] and in 2012 the Tegen-Beeld foundation collaborated with the International Society of Friends of Rimbaud to paint a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, "Le Bateau ivre", on a government building in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.^[11] In 2012 a poem by Marsman was painted on a wall in Berlin.

• Marleen van der Weij: Dicht op de muur. Gedichten in Leiden. Gemeente Leiden, Dienst Bouwen en Wonen, 1996. ISBN 9080139580 (2nd ed.: 1996, 3rd ed.: 1997). 6th, rev. ed.: Burgersdijk & Niermans, Leiden, 2000. ISBN 9075089082 [Description of the first 43 poems].
• Marleen van der Weij: Dicht op de muur 2. Gedichten in Leiden. Burgersdijk & Niermans, Leiden, 2005. ISBN 9075089112 [Description of the poems 44-101]

• Poems on the Underground, a public display of poetry in the London Underground

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wall poems in Leiden.

• Complete list of all poems, with some background information on the project and the poems