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| Rockwell Kent Pelagic Reverie 1919 drawing Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent The Trapper 1921 oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent Self Portrait, Improved 1923 wood-engraving American Museum, Bath, Somerset |
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| Rockwell Kent Design for Boudoir-Themed Mural ca. 1925 watercolor on paper Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent Workers of the World, Unite! 1927 wood-engraving (later reprinted on the cover of New Masses) Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Rockwell Kent Invitation from Random House 1930 linocut and letterpress Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent Sea and Sky 1931 wood-engraving Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent Fair Wind 1931 wood-engraving Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent Diver 1931 wood-engraving Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent The Bather 1931 wood-engraving Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Rockwell Kent Home Port 1931 wood-engraving Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Rockwell Kent Postage Stamp Design for Greenland 1932 wood-engraving Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
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| Anonymous Photographer Rockwell Kent at an Exhibition of his Work ca. 1935 gelatin silver print Archives of American Art, Washington DC |
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| Rockwell Kent Prometheus Unchained 1938 lithograph Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Rockwell Kent Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty 1945 lithograph Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
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| Jesse Gordon Rockwell Kent with Jinx Falkenberg broadcasting in a Television Studio 1955 gelatin silver print Archives of American Art, Washington DC |
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| Rockwell Kent Moby Dick 34-cent Single 2001 postage stamp (after wood-engraved book illustration) National Postal Museum, Washington DC |
from Verse for Urania
A sleepless and unlettered urban glow
On everyone's horizon turns to gist
That rhetoric of starry beasts and gods
Whose figures, whose least phoneme made its fine
Point in the course of sweeping periods –
Each sentence thirty lives long, here below.
From out there notions reach us yet, but few
And far between as those first names we knew
Already without having to look up,
Children that we were, the Chair, the Cup,
But each night dimmer, children that we are,
Each night regressing, dumber by a star.
Still, fiction helps preserve them, those old truths
Our sleights have turned to fairy tales (or worse:
Look at – don't look at – your TV).
The storybooks you'll soon be reading me
About the skies abound with giants and dwarfs.
Think of the wealth of pre-Olympian
Amber washed up on the shores of Grimm –
The beanstalk's tenant-cyclops grown obese
On his own sons; the Bears and Berenice.
Or take those masterfully plotted high
Society conjunctions and epicycles
Society conjunctions and epicycles
In late fable like The Wings of the Dove.
Take, for that matter, my beanstalk couplet, above,
Where such considerations as rhyme and meter
Prevail, it might be felt, at the expense
Of meaning, but as well create, survive it;
For the first myth was Measure . . .
– James Merrill (1976)