Wall poems in Leiden

Wall Poems (Dutch: Muurgedichten, alternatively Gedichten op muren or Dicht op de Muur) is a project in which 101 poems in many different languages were painted on the exterior walls of buildings in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands.

The Wall Poems project was 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. 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. 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, as well as local writers Piet Paaltjens and J. C. Bloem. 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.

A guide available on the web describes a walking tour for visitors to Leiden that takes in 25 of the 101 poems. 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.

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